Don’t Walk on the Grass!

By Fiona Melita

This week, ‘space and place’. Another way to look at Pinterest.  What ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ are employed by designers and users to create, confine, navigate, and deviate?  What is meant by ‘space and place?  What are ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ in this context?  In my exploration, I deliberately ventured off my data manipulated paths of familiarity to see how other users are tactically using Pinterest.  To continue, it is important to have a common understanding of these concepts.

Image 1: There's no 'place' like home. (n.d.)

Tuan (1977) establishes that space and place are not synonymous and must be considered from the meaning of the experience (pp. 6-7).  He explains “space is freedom” (Tuan, 1977, p. 1), openness; and with familiarity, space becomes place (Tuan, 1977, pp. 6-7).  Pinterest has a perception of freedom.  An onslaught of visual imagery, a seemingly endless array of topics, and the ability to add personal images, gives this illusion.  However, Pinterest has measures to maintain the sites intended design and purpose.

In this week’s lecture, V. Kuttainen (personal communication, August 16, 2017) discussed de Certeau and his idea on “the experience versus the design of space”.  The design of a space relates to its purpose and people behave contradictory to the envisaged plan (V. Kuttainen, personal communication, August 16, 2017).  In social media networks then, strategies are the measures intended to maintain the purpose and design.  The tactics are how users get
around the strategies and use the space in a different way.  
How may we see this on Pinterest?

A formalised policy aims to control available content.  The community guidelines establish appropriate and inappropriate content, acceptable behaviour, and the actions for violation of these guidelines.  Inappropriate content may include images of violence, explicit sexual poses, or sites to purchase illegal drugs.  Last week’s blog discussed how people are guided through images according to previous selections, thereby making image display highly personalised (Liu, 2015, p. 135).  User selections are recorded as cookies to guide future image offerings (Pinterest, 2017).  These strategies, combined with navigation tabs such as category lists, attempt to contain users within the designed space.  All this should make it difficult, if not impossible, to access inappropriate content.  However, only a few adventurous terms into the search bar and it was easy to see that all rules could be broken.   

Inappropriate content is available for several reasons.  Community guidelines state, “Some types of content we delete, other stuff we just hide from public areas” (Pinterest, 2017).  Many search terms encounter warning messages and are rejected.  Finding an accepted term though, links you into that guided display, and image after image of inappropriate content appears.  Further, much of the monitoring is dependent on user reporting with seemingly minimal prevention in the initial content adding stage.  Users have also developed ways to have this content appear in general categories.  One user has a page of pornographic images hidden on a legitimate business site that coordinates sales for clothing and accessory stores.  Another uses an image of what appears to be a craft item to lead to sites for drug purchasing and how to grow the perfect 'pot'.  Users seem easily able to thwart any strategy.

This exploration of space, place, strategies, and tactics has had an unfortunate outcome.  My familiar ‘place’, usually filled with craft and fairy garden ideas, is now interspersed with such images as, ‘The Happy Marijuana’ site.  It no longer feels like HOME.  My place has turned back into a space.  Be careful which ‘cookies’ you eat in your social network.





References 

Lui, D. (2015). Public curation and private collection: the production of knowledge on pinterest.com. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 32(2), 128-142. doi:10.1080/15295036.2015.1023329

Pinterest. (2017). Community Guidelines. Retrieved from https://policy.pinterest.com/en/community-guidelines 

Pinterest. (2017). Cookies. Retrieved from https://policy.pinterest.com/en/cookies

There’s no ‘place’ like home [Image]. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://cdn.meme.am/cache/instances/folder837/32783837.jpg 

Tuan, Y-F. (1977). ‘Introduction’: In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. London, England: Edward Arnold Ltd.