Image from John Berger's Ways of Seeing [text reads: Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room's inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.]
The personally engineered online persona contained in a social networking site (a la Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter etc) where we collect the little things that please us, is the contemporary manifestation of the board in our bedroom to which we pin pieces of paper that intrigue us. An interesting contrast is the new manifestation of these 'boards' is not just public, but public on a MASSIVE scale.