First I would like to start by saying I am not a curator in real life, I am studying art history so I might become one, one day. I have a love/hate relationship with the internet. I hate how much power it has but I love the freedom I have online. I have many roles in real life and on the internet like; friend, daughter, curator, artist, woman, student, etc. The role I’m focusing on today is my role as an online curator.I love curating my Instagram feed or even better curating my Pinterest boards. I have been using Pinterest for as long as I can remember. My oldest Pinterest boards are around 8 years old so I started when I was 12 years old around 2015-2016.
I started creating boards about things that interested me like Ariana Grande boards and DIY boards. Eventually I moved on to more aesthetic looking boards like colors. Some of the colors I made boards of are mint, black, red, blue, yellow, orange, etc. The boards contained pins that were aesthetically pleasing to me in their respective color. I took great joy in curating these boards and publishing them. Since Pinterest works with a feed, my feed would generate more pins in these colors which I would add to the boards gradually growing them. However eventually I would lose interest and my feed wouldn’t show me anymore pins for these boards and I would stop growing them. This has happened with almost all my pinterest boards except for one. Which is about cats. This Pinterest board has well over 1500 pins which for eight years of pinning doesn’t seem like a lot. I agree, over the years I have had breaks from Pinterest and realized how the feed works. The more I save from a certain subject like cats, the more I get on my feed so I don’t save as much as I used to even though the cats are really cute.
I still have all my boards but they are all private. Around high school I got like 50 followers on Pinterest which to me was a lot since most of them were strangers. I made some boards private over the years because I didn’t relate to them anymore and they didn’t fit on my profile. I was curating boards but at the same time I was curating my profile on which you can see all the boards. So to me it was important to make some boards private to make my profile pretty. However I kept all my boards just to look back on what I used to like. Pinterest for me has become both a curating space and an archive on some parts of my personality.
So to conclude all this, my curator role online is one of my favourite ones. I curate pinterest boards and my own instagram into something I am proud of. It is also fun to see my pinterest boards years later as a kind of archive of my life and my interests.
I think that this is a perfect example of how we use certain online platforms with a specific role. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what your interests entail or even what your style is. Many users of Pinterest also take on the role of an online curator, even if the goals are different (e.g. for inspiration for the interior of your bedroom or for manifesting something).The different boards also show the development of your interests when using that role, which can be (re)discovered in the boards that you made (and will make) that are saved. This is also where the use of multiple accounts on the same digital platform comes into play. The use of an ‘alt account’ means embodying a different role (or maybe at least a different personality) that is not the same as from the original account. This switching of roles is similar to how we adopt different roles in different environments (e.g. as a teacher or as a sister) in real life.
PS: Cats are universally loved (despite everyone’s interest etc.), so it’s no wonder that that particular Pinterest board has so many pins haha.