BYU French professor Marc Olivier spoke at the annual Raymond E. and Ida Lee Beckham Lecture in Communications. His presentation was entitled, “Curating the Internet: How and Why Pinterest Works.”
PROVO, Utah (Oct. 30, 2014)—What can history teach us about social media sites like Pinterest? BYU French professor Marc Olivier said the phenomenon of Pinterest can be better understood by looking at humanist traditions.
At the annual Raymond E. and Ida Lee Beckham Lecture, Olivier drew parallels between Pinterest, cabinets of curiosities from the Renaissance, and the French philosopher Denis Diderot’s practice of encyclopedic linking.
“[Pinterest] is arguably the least social of all social networks,” said Olivier. “Pinterest users, or ‘pinners,’ do not engage in never-ending streams of selfies and status updates. Instead, they collect and organize material from around the web into thematically grouped pin boards.”
Olivier explained that by 2011, use of the term “curation” was suddenly everywhere. There has been some debate as to whether or not the term can rightfully be applied to Internet users, but thanks to Pinterest and other social media sites where users collect or exhibit electronic content, the term seems to have stuck.
“Recontextualizing and sharing has become the defining online activity of this decade,” said Olivier. “Pinterest is just one very successful example of a trend called ‘social curation,’ that may prove no less significant to this century than the emergence of museums or libraries did in centuries past.”
Olivier argued that we might understand Internet phenomena, such as the emergence of Pinterest, through the study of social curation in other historical contexts and how people managed the expansion of information in the past.
“When I make links between periods here, it’s because I want to show that the problems confronted by historical modes of curation are still with us, renewed and remixed under changing technological conditions,” said Olivier.
He began with the example of Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, rooms that contained collections of various objects from around the world, from paintings and coins to fossils and scientific instruments.
“As the mind of the spectator contemplates the natural and artificial objects together, a complex web of connections begins to form,” said Olivier.
“The connections between objects create value greater than the sum of its parts. The possibilities for creating new understanding derive literally from thinking inside the box from enclosing pieces of the wide world within the domestic sphere.”
Olivier explained that the cabinet of curiosities provides just one example of what Pinterest allows the user to do. “Strictly speaking, the cabinet is the container, not the objects. It is the place of contemplations and connections,” Olivier explained. “Similarly, the value of social media sites is that they essentially provide us with empty spaces to house our collections.”
Another example Olivier cited was French philosopher Denis Diderot’s system of encyclopedic linking. “Diderot’s vision of poetic links overcomes the petrified monumentality of the encyclopedia by replicating the playful mental activities that are more in line with the Cabinet of Curiosities,” said Olivier.
“If you imagine the web as an encyclopedia, then your boards are not articles, they are a nexus of relations. A pin board spatially and visually gathers your own networks of links as you interact with the encyclopedic wealth of the web.”
For more information about Pinterest and the curation of the Internet, contact Marc Olivier.
The event was sponsored by the Raymond E. and Ida Lee Beckham Lecture in Communications. This annual lecture was established by Raymond E. Beckham in 1995 in honor of his late wife, Ida Lee. Raymond E. Beckham was an exceptional leader in education at BYU for 42 years and was instrumental in establishing many programs at BYU, such as the BYU Evening School Program, the BYU Travel Studies program, and the New York Internship program for Communications majors.
—Sylvia Cutler (BA English ’17)