Pinning overthinking

I believe I've blogged (tangentially) about Pinterest a little bit in older posts. But let me just throw it out there - I heart Pinterest! It's colorful, fun, addicting, enlightening. It also makes me feel fat and makes me notice the flaws in my lack of interior decorating, but according to numerous ecards, those are totally normal feelings for us pinners. Overall, Pinterest is a wonderful thing. Heck, if it weren't for Pinterest, my summer school kids would not be doing half of the crafty junk we get to do, because my "art" consists of stick figures, geometric shapes, and derivatives. Not kidding about the derivatives. I rarely doodle, and the only real doodling time I had was in college, when I was taking calculus, and derivatives are curvy, mindless to draw, and make you look smart.

But of course, being Grace, I also love analyzing Pinterest. Pinterest boards are like the visual representations of the brains of random females (75% of users are women, if I'm remembering the stat correctly). See, my brain is full of random crap. Like this.

Grace's Brain Content

• Food is good
• Traveling is fun
• I sure hope I remembered to take my ADD meds this morning or I'm screwed
• Look at that random barn in the middle of that development
• Kids are awesome
• How can I milk my virtual Civilization cottages for maximum science
• What will happen in football in 2014
• Man I am so angsty about work
• Jewelry is so pretty and I'm such a scrooge dang it
• How can I inch ever closer to my goal of looking fashionable
• Dan doesn't do anything right and I hate him
• Dan is the perfect man and I love him
• I love working out because I can watch NFLNetwork and The First 48
• I hate working out because pain
• Please bipap don't explode
• Wow, the air is blowing way too hard in here
• Analyze analyze analyze analyze
• Sociology blogs
• Trade journals
• JCPenney's profit margin and viability status (no, really)

And according to Pinterest, this is what other people think about.

Typical Pinner Brain Content

• My future haircut 
• My kids
• Maximum mason jar efficiency
• Maximum old dresser redo efficiency
• Cute animals
• Stop abusing cute animals
• Look a cute bunny and a cute puppy ALL IN ONE PICTURE
• Easy crockpot meals
• The healing powers of kale and spirolina
• Working out for maximum efficiency
• Inspiration for working out for maximum efficiency 
• Hot shirtless males
• How to do photography
• Teaching stuff
• Craftivity instructions for maximum child abuse
• I'm so fashionable yet I ACTUALLY CURSE LIKE A SAILOR
• Harry Potter
• Other geeky things like Harry Potter
• Best books ever like Harry Potter

So I look at Pinterest and I analyze. What do women want? How do I become more standard population? Do I really have to find puppy pictures cute? Do I really have to shell out for spirolina? 

But I can analyze only so much with the limited sub-par data set I have (my own observations). That's OK, though, because people have actually analyzed Pinterest in academic journals already, confirming my observations and making me feel smart.

Here's some of the fun stuff about Pinterest that makes you question your motives for pinning that spirolina and kale shake recipe. Seriously, is it really you pinning the recipe, or is it the expression of the binary real/idealized self that's making you do it? (That's actually a thing, I've found).

Stuff About Pinterest That Makes You Go What

• Pinterest is by-and-large a female domain - seventy-five percent or more of all users are women.
• The prototypical pinner is a college-educated woman ages 18 to 49 (like me!).
• Although pinners are heavily female, male pinners are more likely to have their pins shared.
• Words expressing positive emotions are common in Pinterest descriptions (love, happy, etc.). Words expressing negative emotions are rare.
• When compared to other social network sites like Twitter, Pinterest users use a lot of action words (do, need, want, should), while Twitter users use words suggesting immediacy (morning, tonight, right now).
• The most common words found in Pinterest descriptions include love, make, chicken, Christmas, cute, cream, chocolate, made, wedding, recipe, best, butter, ideas, and want.
• The most followed boards are travel, education, health and fitness, and home decor.
• Five percent of pins are original, uploaded content. The other 95% are repinned from existing sites. Google Images and Etsy are the most popular.
• I've seen a lot of pin descriptions that go something like "I love this site for house design! Must pin and read later!". This is actually a thing. A good hunk of pin descriptions rely on first-person language. 
• Data analysts have found the perfect Pinterest picture, and it's everything you probably thought it would be - delicious-looking food arranged artfully in a dish and photographed off-center (I don't know the photographical name for this technique).
• If you want your pin to be repinned 23% more than everybody else's lame pins, make sure you crop out your head when you take pictures of your fashionable self grabbing a Starbucks. Case in point:

• Follow me on Pinterest if you want to be subjected to pins about highway on-ramp designs appearing in your news feed.