Pinterest — where you display pictures of stuff you like — fosters "the feeling of being addicted to longing for something..."

"... specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing."

The site’s name combines the words “interest” and “pin,” in reference to “pin boards,” which are also known in various creative professions as inspiration boards or mood boards — basically a large board onto which appropriated images... are juxtaposed to evoke in the viewer a certain feeling, atmosphere or mood. Once the exclusive province of advertising art directors, designers and teenage girls in boarding-school dormitories, mood boards and their electronic equivalents have exploded online. Not just on Pinterest, but also in the form of dopamine-boosting street-fashion blogs and cryptically named Tumblr blogs devoted to the wordless and explanation-free juxtaposition of, say, cupcakes and teapots and shoes with shots of starched shirts and J.F.K.

Mood boards used to be an "exclusive province," something for the "creative professions," and now ordinary people are doing them too. Reminds me of the relationship between journalism and blogging. There's something disconcerting about everybody getting into the act. And the riff-raff who do what was once exclusive must be disparaged. Something missing with these people.

The author of the linked piece Carina Chocano (writing in the NYT Magazine) makes a big point of distinguishing Pinterest picture-posting as different from "curating" and more like advertising, because a curating makes us "more conscious" (like the creative professionals in their exclusive provinces), while advertising makes us less conscious (you peons!).

Why less conscious? Chocano seems to think that operating in the dimension of intuitive desire is lowly — a notion that spikes me to a higher level of consciousness where I observe that Chocano is dealing in elitism and snobbery. (In the New York Times!) She even refers to these pictures as "lifestyle pornography," calling to mind the old feminist argument that pornography shouldn't get First Amendment protection because it doesn't express any ideas. It merely stimulates feelings.

Here's Pinterest if you want a taste of the feeling of being addicted to longing.

ADDED: I just happened upon an aphorism that seems relevant: "In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing."