I've never really understood Twitter, despite trying a number of times to get involved or have it explained to me by Twitter devotees, but I've always thought (without a lot of confidence, since I'm reluctant to define something I don't think I fully understand) of it as news, information, and personal sharing for our busy, fast-paced, ADHD-sort of world. As in, "no, I don't have time to call you, or even email you, but I can update you on my life in 140 characters," or "reading an entire newspaper article (newspaper? what's that?) is passe; I can get an entire day's worth of news with 5 minutes of reading on my smartphone."
I write these things as if I'm derisive or judgmental of Twitter, but I'm not - I myself don't bother to make phone calls or read newspapers, either, and I can't even say that I at least get my information or social interaction via Twitter. I just think it's a bizarre phenomenon, and I'm fascinated by it. I feel almost defective because I can't get into the flow of it.
I'm reminded of Twitter because I recently re-discovered Pinterest, and have been pinning things there, in an alarmingly obsessive manner, for the past few days. Some of the pins are useful: I have a board called "Recipes to Try," another called "Things to Knit." However, other pins are useless at best, self-indulgent at worst: Why do I need a board titled "Things I'm Loving" with an image of my coffee cup, or Ryan Gosling's baby blues looking right at me? (Even weirder, why does said board have 16 followers, even though I only have 7 friends on Pinterest... this means that complete strangers are tracking the things I'm loving. Do they really care about my soap dispenser or what tv series I'm enjoying these days?)
The point is that I see at least two similarities between Pinterest and Twitter. They both require very little time (not to say one can't, and I haven't, wasted plenty of time on both), and almost no attention span whatsoever. Considering how long it's been since I've written a blog entry, but how many things I've pinned in the past 5 days, I'm really starting to think that Pinterest is blogging, note-taking, and scrapbooking for our busy, ADHD-sort of world. I get the satisfaction of putting up something pretty on the web, even if that pretty thing happens to be something pretty that someone else with much more talent, energy, and intelligence than me, worked on, photographed, and put on their website. I get to partake in a bit of self-expression, since even though they're not my things or photographs, they're things I like or even that reflect me in one way or another. I even get the strange (and completely undeserved) mix of pleasure and curiosity when random people I don't know "like" my pins, or better yet, repin them on their own Pinterest boards.
No point to this lengthy ramble, but perhaps you won't notice the pointlessness of this post if I share one of my "things I'm loving" pins that I tend to suspect got me most of those 16 followers.
Find me on Pinterest
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