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Pinterest Sensus Communis

Photographic Imagination and Isolation in the Digital Age

Pinterest is an American image-sharing platform and “visual discovery engine” launched in 2010 by Ben Silbermann. It became the third largest social media site after Facebook and Twitter only two years after its launch and gathered a total of up to 50 million users (Chandler). However, unlike its rivals, Pinterest can almost be categorized as a non-social platform due to its unique functioning protocols. The app is where users' interactions only come second to the individual interactions with the images through acts of sharing, collecting, and archiving. Pinterest users, therefore, can engage in a highly unique process of facing images, especially the photographs, uploaded on this platform as they are sole consumers and producers of them.

The following paper focuses on studying Pinterest as a site for photographic imagination and identity curation, contributing to an age where the multitude of photographs have the power to construct an alternative reality. While the site allows for images of all media, this study will mainly discuss the subject of non-commercial photography and its role in the act of identity-making. By engaging in Susan Sontag’s idea of the image-world and Kantian notion of a sensus communis, I argue that Pinterest contributes to a photography—viewing culture where its users actively imagine and experience a solely aesthetic alternative reality.

The Photographic Imagination

In essence, Pinterest users can collect images, known as pins, and group them for display in larger bulletin boards, known as pinboards. The single currency of Pinterest, then, is the image. While users can interact with others by commenting or following, the main feature of Pinterest is a grid-display homepage with a continuous scroll of images (Figure 1). Users engage with the app by hovering through this endless stream of images, stopping at one that captures their attention, and pinning it to their specific boards. The creators of the app pinpointed this service as a “catalog of ideas” that motivated users to build their collection of images that illustrate aspects of an ideal life: from fashion styles, to dream vacation spots or simply visually pleasing photos (Nusca).
It is essential to note that the photos that circulate on the home feed of Pinterest oftentimes share a few photographic traits: “visually poetic” and lacking in reporting function, resembling catalog photos. As stated by the founders, the app starts only as a casual digital catalogue and hence, not a formal site for profound exchange of knowledge and information. While Pinterest was not originally intended to become a museum of human visual history, the app’s service of amassing images resembles one aspect of such places: allowing those entering to experience reality via photographic imagination. Users look at their pinned photos – those they deem either beautiful or meaningful – and strengthen their sense of existence in a reality not yet available to them. At the same time, besides photos of mere shopping lists, another kind of photography emerges on Pinterest: those that exude a certain photographic atmosphere, or essentially, aesthetic values.

For instance, from a search of the word “café” in the Pinterest engine and a deliberate click on a photo, users will be recommended a series of photographs that revolves around this keyword (Figure 2). The suggested photographs are not so much of a literal capture of a cup of coffee or a random coffee shop anywhere but have to answer to a series of stylistic standards. Photographs of “café” on Pinterest are both professionally and amateurishly taken: a symmetrically framed shot of an outdoor window of a coffee shop, a phone snapshot of the table with a cup of coffee and notebook in a highly edited blue color, a photo of a vinyl player that might be in a café. This collection of diverse photographic sceneries offers different readings of the word “café”, yet still intentionally highlights the aesthetic possibilities of the word. It invites many more photographic perspectives that make the experience of thinking about a mere word more colorful, atmospheric, and romantic through the choices of color, composition, and framing. If the same word is looked up in other search engines (for example, Google or Twitter), the results might not be ensured with the same aesthetic experience. However, the highlight of the suggested photographs is also their easy-to-read, apolitical, and nonhistorical nature. Most of these pins are simple captures of daily life occurrences, and hence, require few to no denotation.

This process of re-imagining reality via photographic means ties neatly with the notion of the image-world proposed by Susan Sontag in her seminal writing On Photography. The Pinterest world is indeed an excellent example of the image-world where its citizens are well aware and in agreement with the lack of verbal context and narrative. The grid display of the Pinterest homepage further heightens the convenience of seeing more aesthetically uniform photographs. It simultaneously reinforces a specific worldview, one with a touch of sentimentalism. In the words of Susan Sontag, this proliferation of aesthetic captures of life is as if to say: “There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way” (Sontag 17). When one’s immediate reality can not sustain a consistent aesthetic like the one that their Pinterest homepage displays, the photographs inherently complement what people view as desirable sights. The curation of Pinterest has somewhat redefined how life should look and yearned to be for the users: aesthetically consistent and pleasing.

A Pinterest Sensus Communis

On a larger scale, this inclination for the aesthetic has a profound implication for the way we look at photographs and reality. In his influential work Critique of Pure Reason, Emmanuel Kant put forth an idea of the “pure” aesthetic experience where human preconceptions should be detached from the pleasure of admiring beauty. The notion of aesthetic then, can be universally accepted (Kant 49). In other words, what is considered beautiful by one should be regarded so by many others. His definition of a group that shares similar aesthetic admiration, sensus communis, is highly applicable in the case of Pinterest users as this is a community engaged in photographic imagination taken from a shared pool of images. The collective identity-making in the Pinterest world, therefore, can be read as a process of photographic imagination. One paparazzi-captured photograph of a model wearing daily clothes walking down the street might be devoid of a clear message. But a series of photographs with the same motif can send off various implications: what style, body type, and appearances are desirable.

A Pinterest board can also be regarded as a personal archive made up of photographs, only with the exception that most of the photos are not necessarily taken by the archivist. They might be uploaded on the platform by someone else, who might have taken them from another source. The history of the photograph — or the individuality of it — is rarely emphasized. This allowance for anonymous and communal use of the photographs makes Pinterest a shared reservoir of human aesthetics — where people initially join as individual producers and consumers of the photographs, but inevitably belong to a communis who “pin” the same collection of images.

Having been downplayed as a “fantasy space where users—women—waste time planning for weddings and babies they may never have rather than doing the important work of the internet”, Pinterest became a less researched topic partly due to its label of feminine practice platform (Almjeld 2). Nevertheless, in my opinion, it is the fantastical nature of Pinterest that makes this site a rich source of analysis. On the one hand, Pinterest pinboards can be a liberating and personal space for aesthetic experiences. On the other hand, its personalized algorithm somewhat contributes to a culture of convenient photographic viewing and disregard for context. Without careful consideration, the experience of scrolling solely for the aesthetics might create an illusion of actually living it: people take photos of the same subjects with the same technical choices – color, composition, framing, and the like — to regenerate and strengthen the aesthetic they deem desirable. Harmless as it seems, aesthetic isolation also runs the risk of creating an illusion of total knowledge. The “poignant longings for beauty”, or the habitual prioritization of aesthetics over all else, momentarily deprives people of critical reasoning (Sontag 18). They might forget to ask why certain aesthetics are proliferating on their homepage, and why they look so pleasing, and at the same time so different from their day-to-day world. From there comes the space for more political concerns: who or what determines the ideal aesthetic in an app like Pinterest? Is it the users, or the algorithm? Would people upload photos from their personal lives into the platform if their discovery page is filled with different aesthetics? And if they do upload a photograph, would that resemble their already curated pinboards, or is a photograph completely irrelevant in terms of visual form?

Conclusion

As Pinterest sets the standard for the desired aesthetic, it also influences the way we construct our self-identity through the photographic imagination conjured by the grid system display of photos. In the end, the problem of Pinterest, which is also its unique selling point, is that it allows for aesthetic isolation. While users suppose they have the freedom to pin everything they want to, they are also exposed to such boundaries of similar aesthetics as there is no way to simply switch up the collection of photos chosen by the algorithm and “refresh” a discovery page. The question of how to poke the visual filter bubble is also the question of how to see the things we have never seen before, and therefore have no way to construct the path to it verbally or logically. In the words of Susan Sontag, the first step of reverting the isolation is not to “accept [the world] as the camera records it”, but to “start from not accepting the world as it looks, [because] all possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no” (Sontag 17). Maybe, our first step is to start asking questions of what stands behind our pinned interests.

Bibliography

Almjeld, Jen. “Collecting Girlhood: Pinterest Cyber Collections Archive Available Female Identities.” Girlhood Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 1 Jan. 2015, https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2015.080303. Accessed 5 Nov. 2019.
Chandler, Stephanie. “Pinterest Power: How to Use the Third Largest Social Media Site to Promote Your Business.” Forbes, 13 June 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2012/06/13/pinterest-power- how-to-use-the-third-largest-social-media-site-to-promote-your-business/?sh=766d91c32ca2. Accessed 2 Nov. 2023.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge University Press, 28 Feb. 1999.
Nusca, Andrew. “Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann: We’re Not a Social Network.” Fortune, 14 July 2015, fortune.com/2015/07/13/pinterest-ceo-ben-silbermann/. Accessed 18 May 2023.
Sontag, Susan . On Photography, by Susan Sontag, RosettaBooks LLC, 1977.