Third Group Assignment

Frozen group is back with its third group assignment! Prepare yourselves for a long post…

This week’s assignment was a pretty nice one. We had to log in to Pinterest, pin interesting pictures regarding our theme of lifestyle and discuss and analyze the pictures later on. Luckily our group members were actively involved in finding pictures and we managed to create altogether seven boards with over 80 pinned pictures.

The assignment started with the group leader creating the account. Pinterest proved to be quite easy and simple to use, so it didn’t take long to actually get the pinning going. Before searching for the pictures, we edited the profile a bit. For example the interests were edited in a way that it would be easier to find pictures regarding to our theme. We also started to follow different boards which were similar to our theme.

The process of finding pictures was relatively easy. Pinterest contains sooo many images and puts together such a large amount of different themes, so there really is anything for anyone. Our lifestyle theme gave us also a wide choice of pictures to pin as lifestyle can contain pretty much anything. Due to that, we managed to collect many boards with varying images. Some of our boards for example comprised pictures of art work, decoration, food, health, pictures from abroad etc. We tended to pin images that we thought were worth seeing, related to our theme, were emotive and pics that we just simply thought looked great. We also found the pics we chose inspirational, interesting, appealing and in a way powerful.

Some of Frozen Group's boards

We noticed that our group members had quite similar taste when it came to choosing pictures, so our images had some things in common. Most of our pictures were for instance quite artistic, colorful and beautiful. Common factors among the pinned pics were also the emotive and inspirational sides most of them had. In addition we felt like our Pinterest pictures in a sense represented a lifestyle of a quite active and life-loving person. The pictures transmitted mainly a happy feeling, so a lot of us were inspired by pics that had a kind of lively and bright feel to them. The most important common factor among the pics were however the fact that they all related to the theme of lifestyle.

The differences between the pictures had mainly to do with the fact that our theme is so broad, so the pics varied a lot depending on in which board they were placed. Even though there were some differences, we felt like our pics were still in some kind of harmony. Some differences were seen for example in the colors of the pics, some images were in black & white form, whereas others were more colorful. We noticed also that some of the pictures were simpler than others and some pics contained text while other pics did not.

All of our pinned pictures originated from other Pinterest users or other websites, such as buzzfeed.com. We also noticed that a lot of our pics originated from different blogs and from tumblr and flickr. We didn’t create pictures of our own, we only found our pics from other Pinterest users' boards.

 When thinking about re – and decontextualisation, we came to the conclusion that the pictures themselves haven’t changed that much, even though they are shifted to a whole new context. However, if the original source had for example captions and other pictures next to the picture itself, the pic could get a whole new meaning. People can interpret the picture differently in the new context, compared to the old where it had captions etc. Also, if the original picture is modified for example by adding text to it, the picture’s meaning changes drastically. 

  

Recontextualisation is seen for example in this picture. The text is added to the photo afterwards, so the current image has a different meaning than the original photograph in its original context.

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Until next time...



-ER