Therapists often run into a curious problem during treatment: Clients
aren’t very good at describing their emotions. How exactly do you
express the nature of your depression?
So this spring, relationship counselor Crystal Rice hit upon a clever
idea. She had her clients use Pinterest, the popular picture-pinning
social network, to create arrays of images that map out their feelings.
It’s a brilliant epiphany: While emotions can be devilishly difficult to
convey in words, they’re often very accessible via pictures. “This way
we can really identify what’s going on,” Rice says.
As Rice discovered with her clients, Pinterest’s
appeal is that it gives us curiously powerful visual ways to
communicate, think, and remember. If you see one picture of a guitar,
it’s just a guitar; but when you see 80 of them lined up you start to
see guitarness. This additive power is precisely what helps Rice’s
clients paint their internal worlds.
Part of the value of Pinterest is that it brings you
out of yourself and into the world of things. As the Huffington Post
writer Bianca Bosker argued, Facebook and Twitter are inwardly focused
(“Look at me!”) while Pinterest is outwardly focused (“Look at this!”).
It’s the world as seen through not your eyes but your imagination.
Granted, Pinterest encourages plenty of dubious
behavior too. It can be grindingly materialistic; all those pins of
stuff to buy! Marketers are predictably adrool, and as they swarm
aboard, the whole service might very well end up collapsing into a heap
of product shilling.
But I suspect we’ll see increasingly odd and clever
ways of using Pinterest. If a picture is worth a thousand words, those
collections are worth millions.
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