Just finished reading Tania Sheko’s blog post about Pinterest as well as viewed her SlideShare presentation below. Go ahead and check it. I’ll wait.
You can tell she has thought about Pinterest and its thoughtful uses for quite awhile. Sometimes you just know someone else has paid her dues just in the self-assuredness that shines through. Tania is self-assured in her Pinterest practice and knows what it affords.
I commented on her post because I have been thinking about my own tool use of late, and about how I have lost one of my favorites–Zeega. I feel its loss so keenly because it helped me create. I got the dopamine rush when I used it and now its gone. I have looked far afield to find something to give me the same feeling, but no joy suffices so far. This has made me think about how I need to embrace the undifferentiated creative life, the one that cleaves close to the heartwood and releases the Muse there. Tania’s post made me write the comment below:
Love the uses for Pinterest. Wondering what other wild uses might be made of it not intended by its creators, what re-purposes? Could we make a paper-style Pinterests for the classroom? in the hallway? for parents to create, too. Could Pinterest be like a seed packet? How about a mystery gift used one time and then discarded? Could we collect badges together? or pictures of weeds and wildflowers which we assign ours and others’ names to?
I find myself looking at your blog’s background photo and thinking to myself, “That is a much more authentic Pinterest board than Pinterest could ever muster. So why can’t Pinterest be more like it?”
Back to your post, I find all of these “annotation/curation” tools to be great for helping me to process the world, but I also ask myself, “Why?” You answer so ably here and I want to go …differently,too. I am not saying better, just saying further. There is a natural progression from collecting without comment to curating to creating. I think that creating is where I want to be. I want what Pinterest is and what Pinterest does to serve the Muse. That is what my paragraph above dithers about. Just thinking about how so much of what I do is secondary, indirect and adaptive. I get this powerful voice inside me that says, “Don’t just derive, make and thrive.” Of course, the irony is that I am replicating what you have started. For that I thank you, Tania.
I am struck by this progression and would add a bit more by using a Pinterest template from Canva (is that hopelessly derivative or what?)
Now the final reveal. I derived these thoughts from the very interesting ideas here. Sigh. Is it habitually derivative all the way down? Commenters are invited to help me out of this quicksand.