Messy Rhetoric: Grabill & Pigg

This article was also very interesting, and parts of it, I feel, are also applicable to my paper. The first thing they said that I really liked was "identity is performed and leveraged in small, momentary  and fleeting acts". I like this because first, it makes sense, and second, within Pinterest, everything you do could be considered a small, irrelevant act. I also liked the quote a sentence beneath the previous one, reading, "those who do not hold traditional forms of expertise participate by performing identity in ways that extend beyond establishing individual credibility". I like this one as well because, again, with Pinterest someone who isn't an expert at crafts may feel the need to step up more and re-pin things as opposed to producing original pins.

The authors also talked about learning, which I enjoyed. They said that "people are motivated to learn new things when they need to learn them". This could apply to many things in life, so I'm going to apply it to my project. Until yesterday I never cared or needed to know how to get spray paint off concrete, but when the problem arose, I was motivated to learn how to remove it. I believe the same applies to crafts and DIY's. People get bored or want to do something crafty, so they're motivated to find something. The authors also noted that motivations are different, meaning the users are "quite diverse and not at all coherent as a group". I like this quote, however, I have to disagree in general terms. I believe that for maps, this is very true. People will want to take different ways. However, for other things, such as social media, it is relatively easy to get a large group of people moving in one direction. With Pinterest it's the same way. The board is DIY & Crafts, so all who use it are motivated to find or share DIY's and craft ideas.

I also found the section where the authors discuss identity in academic papers, saying that all too often other authors fail to discuss it, resulting in the "lack [of] descriptive validity and coherence". This made me smile, since my whole paper is going to be about identity and I'm going to try to tie everything back to identity. They also termed or used, identity-in-use. This was interesting for me to read about, since I've never thought about how an identity is constructed before this project. The authors said, "identity is understood as an "emergent product rather than the pre-existing source of...semiotic practices"". This is another perfect quote for me, as I'm going to be arguing that users bring their own identity to Pinterest, but leave with a different identity that is shaped by the medium, a new identity that has emerged.

Two more quotes I want to briefly state are: "participants often do not build fully formed or coherent portraits of who they are as people, but rather draw on parts of their identity", so they don't bring their entire personality, rather it comes in pieces, such as with different re-pins, likes, or comments. Another was, "online "spaces" and dynamics enabled multiple identities", this is my whole argument, but dealing specifically, so I like this quote. A quote found further in the paper says, "identity performance act not only as ways to convince an audience of one's credibility or status but also as catalysts for more conversation". I like this, since within Pinterest, all pins are essentially starting a new conversation, and each time it is re-pinned, the conversation is pushed forward.