“Pinning” with purpose.

A SYTYCB Entry

We all use Pinterest at this point, right?

No?

Ah. You have better things to do than catalogue the recipes you’ll probably never make, the clothes you’ll probably never buy, the hair color you’ll never wear, the homemade laundry soap you’ll never wash with, the amazing abs you’ll never discover under that belly jiggle, the perfectly decorated home in which you’ll never live. You’re a wiser woman than I.

It’s a web-addict’s fantasy-land, ripe with opportunity to question what our online lives ACTUALLY look like.

For every hundred and fifty “cutest wedding photo ever!” snapshot there are perhaps one or two “pins” of any real intellectual or social merit. For every three hundred “fifty calorie fudge” pins, we have maybe five or six pins linking back to articles that tackle Real Issues.

I’ve been wondering over the past several weeks whether Pinterest is really an accurate reflection of the way we spend our e-time, and whether the deluge of “thinspiration” and “cake pops! cake pops! cake pops!” pictures out there really constitute the interests and fantasies of our online buddies.

Call it a pipe dream, but what if — WHAT IF?!?!? — we put our minds to pinning (and therefore directing massive amounts of web traffic toward) images that came from CHALLENGING web content? If those cute “pregnant lady fashion blogs” are able to garner thousands of hits from a picture of a maxi skirt snapped with their iPhone, wouldn’t it be something of a revolution if interviews with Caitlin Moran, Hilary Clinton, Ruba Nadda, or Carolyn Feldman made the rounds and snagged thousands of “repins?”

Like any other social media platform, Pinterest puts the power in the hands of the user (or, the “Pinner” in this case), and, much like our hard-earned dollars give us power to direct cash to products and causes we support, so too do we have the power to direct web traffic and attention and discussions toward content of social, ecological, political, feminist merit.

Why not Pin links to MissRepresentation.org? Or The Women’s Media Center site? Or the Women and Hollywood blog? Or Feministing?

Why waste our Pinning Power with purposeless pictures? We’re more than the sum of our baby announcement pics and low-cal ranch dressing recipes. We’re smarter than all of those interior design pictures and fancy manicure links suggest. Our online persona is more well-read than those links to “banish the love handles!” posts make us out to be.

Why not take back the Pinboards and create a cadre of Smart Pinners. Responsible Pinners. Ladies who don’t “Pin now, read later,” but actually READ NOW. Think now. Encourage Now. Change our online diet. Pin with Purpose.