Pinterest - Creating Community via Lifestyle Enclaves

Pinterest. What in the world is that? I seem to have encountered three opinions of the site; totally sucked in, refusing to participate, not aware of it's existence. The last category is somewhat irrelevant to what I want to talk about. The second category is really not that different from the first. If you ask them why they refuse, it is usually not due to the fact that they disagree with what it says or who uses it. Instead it is because they are avoiding becoming part of the first category.

But what is so terrible about the organizing of ideas and images? I would argue that it is the draw of familiar individuals within lifestyle enclaves formed by collections of boards and search categories.

Let me first preface by saying that I have a different definition of 'community' than Bellah does. Or rather, I think it as been redefined by our current culture. Community has become more of something you create or build. Say a high school is experiencing an extreme case of the cliques, the administrators may chose to hold workshops on 'building community'. Community is about creating relationships and fostering connections that might otherwise have fallen flat. It is not necessarily organic in the way Bellah suggests.

On Pinterest, the idea is to find other boards that host similar things to your own or search based on what you are looking for and discover pins from anyone who has pins that fit in the category.

What this creates is a thread of connections or, as Bellah would put it, online lifestyle enclaves. Following the links of who follows who would show a web of connections that was totally based on preference. But multiple lifestyle enclaves converge on your home feed to create your personalized community. I use community because it doesn't qualify as Bellah's lifestyle enclave because it is more than one self-selected group.

So, Pinterest presents a interesting twist on Bellah's binary. The individual threads of "followings" (along with the Pinner's own board) may be lifestyle enclaves, but the whole of Pinterest participants form a thriving community.