HBR BLOG: Pinterest as Free Market Research

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GRANT MCCRACKEN 17th Feb 2012

Categories are interesting to anthropologists. They are the "buckets" into which we organize the world. More exactly, they are the buckets with which we read the world. We have a bucket called "bird." Inside that is a bucket called "Robin." As spring approaches, we see winged creatures on our lawn and the buckets leap to the ready. Robin! Bird! Spring! This is culture in action.

From this point of view, Pinterest is a treasure. It's a chance to see American culture as if from a glass-bottom boat. Yes, some of it is a little reductive. But sometimes what people stuff into the categories is a chance for us to see exactly what they mean. Pinterest is a little Rosetta Stone, a table of equivalencies. Oh, so that's what YOU mean by home. Here's what I mean. In a culture that flowers with an increasingly diverse variety, this is useful.

Pinterest founders Ben Silbermann, and Evan Sharp are mapping American culture. Mapping not just the categories but the movements of our culture.

For some time now, and certainly since Clay Shirky's great work, we have been on notice that the new digital technology makes new categories and new cultural order possible. Pinterest helps us build and share these categories and to specify what we mean in a medium more telling than language. And this makes Pinterest an observation platform from which to study a culture that becomes ever more liquid, responsive, crowd-sourced and generally speaking dynamic. And this potentially makes Pinterest a place to detect early changes and to get early warnings, a pretty useful thing as our culture accelerates.

There has been some regrettable chatter online that Phoebe Connelly characterizes as "hating on the ladies." Specifically, some appear to think that Pinterest is a consumer wish list for women. One hater goes so far as to suggest that Pinterest is for "women who wish they were still planning their wedding." This is sexist drivel and deserves the contempt Connelly shows for it. It misses much of what makes Pinterest exceptional and especially the way it can serve users as an opportunity for self-exploration/self-expression and the rest of us as a particularly rich view of a culture under construction.