Remember when surfing the internet was a fairly solitary sport? I've been missing those pre-social networking days lately. As I wrote last fall, I'd gotten hooked on Pinterest and was happily pinning away, creating my own virtual moodboards. But the social networking aspect took over, and now it's only good manners to follow your Facebook friends' pins. Netiquette pressures threaten my once reclusive guilty pleasure. I no longer can pin just anything that catches my eye--I have to consider the fact that all my friends and acquaintances are going to see it. Case in point: regardless of your political affiliation, you have to feel sorry for Ann Romney who had pundits speculating about her (most likely innocuous) Anna Karenina pin on her Books Worth Reading board. Not that my pins contain any agenda or hidden messages. I just feel sorry for my followers who have to scroll through my pins of lavender, fall foliage, and cute animals...just like I have to scroll through my friends' pins of wedding dresses, baked goods, and kids' birthday party ideas. On a separate but related note, I think it's creepy when an ad for a lavender conference pops up on Facebook immediately after I post a lavender pin. (Unfortunately, these invasive cross-marketing tactics work. I did click on the ad and register for the conference.) I can't help but suspect that Facebook not only snoops around my Pinterest boards, it also keeps track of my google searches. A few months ago, a relative had gout, and I looked it up on Wikipedia--exactly once. Now Facebook constantly suggests that I join gout support groups; the Facebook algorithm thinks that I'm a lavender-loving girl with gout.
Social networks, please don't judge a girl by her pins...or her google searches. They don't tell the whole story.
You shouldn't be surprised about the lavender ad, heck it might have been put there by a IMC grad...
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