Tag: Like

1191: Social Burnout

I’ve been thinking this for quite a while, as you’ve probably noticed from past posts I’ve made on the subject, but I’m beginning to feel completely burned-out on social media. Everything has to be social these days. Everything has to have little like buttons and little comment buttons and allow every denizen of the Internet to spew their ill-informed thoughts and opinions over it, or to share it pointlessly to Facebook.

Earlier today, I was distressed to discover that an official Pizza Hut app is coming to Xbox 360, presumably aimed at those people who find phoning, using a mobile phone app or using the Internet to order a pizza too easy and would instead prefer to do so by navigating the monstrosity that is the Metro interface. One line in the Polygon article about it — here — jumped out at me and kind of drove it home how “way too far” we’ve taken social media these days. Here it is:

“After submitting an order, users can share their choice with friends via Facebook.”

Why. Why. Why why whywhywhy would you want to do this?

Pizza Hut aren’t the only offenders in this regard, of course — Amazon offer a convenient facility to tweet or share on Facebook anything that you’ve just bought, as do a lot of other websites. You can even set up the PlayStation 3 and Vita to automatically share every purchase you make on PSN to Facebook. And every time I see this facility, I wonder why on Earth anyone would want to use it. But apparently people do.

This glut of auto-sharing is killing the original point of social media, which was to allow people to engage in conversations with one another by sharing things that were important to them. Now, it’s more like a convention of ADHD sufferers running around going “I JUST BOUGHT A PIZZA! LOOK AT THIS VIDEO OF A DUCK RUNNING! HERE’S A PICTURE OF A CAT! I’D SAY SOMETHING PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE BUT ‘SOMEBODY’ WOULDN’T LIKE IT!” rather than what I remember my early experiences with Facebook being like.

I vividly recall resisting signing up to Facebook in its early days, because everyone seemed to be doing it and I just couldn’t be arsed with it. When I eventually started using it, however, I was impressed to discover a site that was seemingly built for real-life friends. Any time I added someone to my friends list, I had to indicate how I knew them, and the other person had to verify that story. My profile was only visible in full to those whom I had marked as a friend, and there weren’t really any privacy settings to worry about. Stuff that was shared was the sort of stuff you’d share if you were actually in the same room with friends — what you’d been up to, some photos from your holiday, perhaps a longer piece of writing in the form of a “Note”. No games, no spam, no “I Fucking Love Science” posts. Just actual interactions. The Like button was there, but it didn’t have the all-encompassing power it has now, and people hadn’t really started using it as a substitute for actually saying things.

Now, though, with the proliferation of “LIKE IF YOU HATE CANCER, SHARE IF YOU LOVE KITTENS” posts, the signal-to-noise ratio is all out of whack, and people are used to posting tons of crap while simultaneously saying nothing of value. This has the side-effect of meaning that when you actually want a response from someone, it’s quite difficult to get one. The other day I attempted to find someone to take care of our pet rats while we’re on holiday in Canada; the only responses I got were jokey, non-serious ones, and within a couple of hours it had dropped off the face of everyone’s News Feed, never to be seen again… unless I were to slip Facebook $7 to “promote” it, of course.

Or take today, when I saw someone post an actual non-rhetorical question that needed an answer, and the first response was a “Like”.

Not helpful. At all. You “Like” my question? Great. Do you “Like” it enough to actually fucking answer it, perhaps? No? Then piss off. I’m not so desperate for validation that I count the number of “Likes” a particular post gets and see it as some form of brag-worthy e-peen.

That said, if you want to “Like” my new “K-On Girls Wear the Union Jack” fanart cover photo, feel free.

Sigh. I’m such a hypocrite.

I’ve been rediscovering forums recently — I was a member of a My Little Pony forum for a while before it shut down due to admin drama, and I’m currently taking some tentative steps into the RPG Maker community. While forums have their own issues — largely people being a little lawyerish about the community rules and regulations — I’m beginning to think they’re not such an outdated means of discussion as many seem to think…

#oneaday, Day 254: Be The First Of Your Friends To Like This

I remember back in primary school we were encouraged to never use the words “nice” or “said” because they were boring. There are always better words to use, we were told, so we should be creative and extend our vocabularies.

Fast forward to today and we have much the same issue with the word “like”, a word which is rapidly losing all meaning thanks to its total domination over the social networking space. Every day on Facebook, it’s a fair bet that there is at least one entry in everyone’s news feed that says “Amber likes OMG!! Where did you get you’re shoes LOL! on ♥.” or “Bob likes I hate it when your trying 2 go 2 sleep and u cant on Likebook.” Not only do these sentences make no sense, they’re a symbol of a peculiar shift in communication styles that has taken place in recent years, particularly amongst teens and tweens.

Essentially, rather than just typing “I hate it when you’re trying to go to sleep and you can’t” and sharing that particular inanity with the world (not to mention spelling it correctly), it seems that it’s now much more the done thing to go and find a website which lists hundreds of said inanities for the sole purpose of allowing people to Like them on Facebook. There’s a kind of “distancing” involved. Anyone can click “Like” on something. As soon as you write it yourself, it becomes more personal, and harder to do.

Trouble is, the word “Like” is being used so much that it stops making sense sometimes. Or its context is completely inappropriate. Take the latest “check-in” craze, GetGlue, which is actually a pretty neat idea. Users tag the things that they, yes, like as well as the things that they dislike and can then get suggestions of other things they might like based on other users’ tastes. Fair enough. However, when a site offers you the opportunity to not only “Like” ebola but also check into it, you have to question if the correct terminology is really being used in this instance.

And where’s the opportunity to dislike things? GetGlue is unusual in that it does specifically allow people to say “I don’t like this”. There’s no opportunity to do that on Facebook. If a friend posts a status update that informs everyone that, say, their leg has fallen off and their family are dead and not only that, someone posted a bag of poo through their letterbox then the only things to do are to “Like” it, which seems rather tactless and inappropriate, or to actually leave a comment which will probably start with “I wish there was a Dislike button” and end with too many exclamation marks.

Perhaps Facebook is attempting to make us all more positive. Instead of writing “I’m so sad. My family are dead, my leg has fallen off and someone posted a bag of poo through my letterbox” which, let’s face it, no-one is going to click “Like” on, perhaps you should put a positive spin on it. “My family are dead, my leg has fallen off and someone posted a bag of poo through my letterbox. But at least I found 76p in small change in my jacket pocket, Snickers later ftw!!!”

aplenty from there on, I feel.