Forget words. Pictures are where it’s at in 2013.
In the always-evolving online and social media landscape, images, not text, are in the ascendant these days. And that trend is making picture-oriented sites such as Pinterest increasingly important to marketers.
“Social [media] is very rapidly shifting away from text,” says Apu Gupta, whose company, Curalate, helps retail clients such as Gap and Saks try to maximize their impact on sites like Pinterest. “It’s going to change shopping behavior both online and offline.”
But the growing emphasis on images is bigger than just marketing and consumerism. Gupta again:
This is the direction the world is moving—everyone has a cameraphone in their pocket, and the whole web is becoming high def. In many ways we’re circling back to the days of our ancestors. Back when we all lived in caves we painted on walls. Now we’re pinning and reblogging and doing various other things to express our aspirations.
As a word guy, I aspire to crafting catchy sentences for a living. So stories like these make me wince. And yet, I have to admit that I see evidence of this trend all over the place, especially online. Pictures—bigger pictures, and more of ’em—are simply everywhere. Call it the Pinterest-ification of the Web, if you will.
If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, it’s a social media site where users can “pin” images of things they’re “interested” in. Hence the name. It’s not much more than a personal, digital bulletin board, really.
Some users augment their chosen images with text descriptions or comments. But words aren’t the point. The point of Pinterest is visually capturing one’s personal vision of the good life, using pictures to represent what such a life looks like. Pinterest reminds me of the personalized collages that junior high students the world over have made for decades, cutting and pasting images from magazines and catalogs that that represent them, their identity or, indeed, their hopes and dreams.
As Gupta noted, Pinterest’s graphic-heavy approach to presenting content online seems to be spreading. I see it all over the place, actually. Lots of sites now offer big, tiled rows of images, à la Pinterest.
For instance, eBay (where, I’ll admit, I spend a fair bit of time lurking), has introduced a new feature that includes a tiled, personalized page of listings for anything similar to what you’ve bought or searched for recently. At first, I found it kind of annoying. Recently, though, I’ve found myself scrolling through row upon row of pictures. And it’s actually kind of scary how well eBay “knows” what other products I might find attractive.
And then there’s website design in general. Go to billboard.com, usatoday.com, mtv.com or many other news and information outlets, and you’ll find ever-bigger pictures (and, in some case, giant-sized text to go with it). The Pinterest aesthetic has clearly caught on. If we want to push it one step further, Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 8, borrows from this tiled-image trend as well.
I think there are at least two potential—and significant—outcomes related to our culture’s infatuation with images.
First, I wonder how much the increasing emphasis on pretty pictures makes wading through big blocks of text (like this one) more difficult. How might this influx of digital images be distracting or undermining our ability to read and think deeply, to exercise sustained attention to a written, textual argument?
Personally, I know that I struggle to pay attention more than I used to when reading long articles or books. I’m sure there are any number of reasons for that. But I do wonder how much the Internet has trained my brain to expect some sort of satisfying visual hit.
Perhaps more significantly, I wonder how this tsunami of aspirational imagery might be shaping and influencing us on a more spiritual level. The most alluring pictures, after all, can become focal points for our deepest longings. But if it’s an image of something we may never actually acquire—like, say, in my case, a Lamborghini Aventador—what is the value of fixing my eyes upon it? It may be nothing more than a harmless fantasy. But make no mistake: it is a fantasy.
And if it’s an image that we believe will bring fulfillment if only we can possess it, at what point does such a desire cross over from being a cry of our hearts to something that might be idolatrous?
God has created our hearts to be filled by Him. And yet humanity has, from its earliest days, excelled at finding idolatrous substitutes. In the garden of Eden, Eve was attracted to the forbidden fruit because it was, as Genesis 3:6 puts it, “a delight to the eyes.” Fast-forward into the book of Exodus, and Aaron’s golden calf represented a shiny-but-impotent stand-in for God.
In the New Testament, the Apostle John warns us against longing too deeply for the things of this world: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:15-17).
In his 1988 song “If I Stand,” Rich Mullins put it this way: “The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the Giver of all good things.” Quite honestly, I struggle at times to offer up my heart’s allegiance to the right things. After all, “stuff of earth” can seem pretty alluring … and all the more so when so many places we set our eyes are trying to capture our attention with some sparkling version of “the good life.”
The onslaught of images isn’t likely to abate any time soon—on Pinterest or anywhere else, for that matter. Given that reality, our challenge is to set our eyes and hearts on what matters most, just as the Apostle Paul prayed in Ephesians that we might: “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.”
Recent Comments