AHA! What You Pin Is What You See: Pinterest and Visual Literacy

OMG! Repin!

Everyone's in a fuss today about Pinterest, the new "vision board-styled socio sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based collections" (Wikipedia.com). The site's mission statement is  to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting," (Pinterest.com). If you have ever used Pinterest, it is very easy to start "pinning" things into collections based on what YOU like, or whatever you deem collection-worthy. I started Pinterest last summer, when a friend of mine invited me to join the website. I liked it initially because it was similar to Stumbleupon, in that I could just browse my interests and essentially waste time looking at things.

After a while though, I lost interest in Pinterest, mostly because I was working and in school so much that I didn't really have time to just sit and look at images of things that might have caught my attention. But examining Pinterest as a media tool that allows us to communicate and connect with each other through images alone (yes, there is text too, but the images are what catch our eye), I think it is a very interesting web application. I can go on my Pinterest homepage and see what my followers are pinning, and "repin" things that I find interesting or to my liking. All I have to do is LOOK at images and decide "yes, I like this" or "no, that doesn't really interest me" and my Pinterest boards are created. This is visually based judgment-making behavior, and something that fits very well into Visual Literacy. Can you think of any other places online where sharing your interests is as easy as sharing a photo? Looking at an image and making a judgment? Do all social networking sites have an element of visual communication?