I have always been somewhat skeptical of the like button on Facebook. I think in my case it is especially true because I am a rather empathetic person. I personally feel if I like one person’s post, I need to like everyone’s post as to not exclude someone. Or if I like a friends post, I have to be sure to like them all as to not make them feel bad… things like that…
It is especially true in my own little world where I think I am King of the World and everybody is watching me, I have a heightened sense of the importance of my likes, or the disappointment of my likes… but that is beside the point…
But I have pondering it in depth more lately, I tried to think, exactly what are we doing when we like something? What is the end game? Aren’t we in a way trying to alter our friend’s behavior in a way to get them to post the things we like? We reward them with a like when it is something we find pleasing, and punish when we don’t like it… By that logic, isn’t the goal to eventually to produce a news feed that we should technically hit like on everything we saw?
It is a bit unrealistic to think we have the time or energy to hit like on every post on Facebook… but that is what the logical conclusion of what we are doing is, as per the relationship, as a friend posts what he knows you like, he or she would expect to get their like in return… By entering into the like relationship and process, that is part of what you are signing up for… but the logical conclusion will never happen and always leave people disappointed when they think they have given the people what they wanted and aren’t rewarded for it… Even if people just didn’t see it, you will be disappointed thinking that they saw it and didn’t like it…
Part of me thinks that we all just get more jaded as well, that we demand ever increasingly more thought provoking or funny posts in order to receive our likes… We always withhold the ultimate gift of liking everything someone posts, what we all want in a way…. It is a bit of what happens with the internet in general with our ability to like or follow something…
You can compare it to what happens in a capitalist society in general… Likes are like the dollars of the relationship market… our like dollars…
In a capitalist society and with the way our mind works, we do grow increasingly more jaded and jaded as the initial excitement of something wears off… we are always demanding that next rush as we become less and less happy with life, everything starts to seem so boring and mundane… Nothing seems to make us happy anymore…
Psychologically it may be something that everyone goes through and must learn to become aware of and work on… It is part of our mental process, like any drug addiction… we need more and more of something or something new and exciting…
We need to become aware of this and retrain our brains, we have to learn to enjoy the simple things in life again… It is almost a continuous process to bring ourselves back to center and be happy with simplicity… I think something like mindfulness and meditation can be very important to achieving this…
Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed the Facebook like addiction at times, it’s like you start to get into an agreement with some people… you like all of my stuff, and I will like all of your stuff, and we will both get our fix…
I just think the system is flawed logic with unattainable goals… the logical conclusion is to eventually like everything you see, except almost none of us have the mental drive to commit to an effort like that… it always ends up with sporadic likes and disappointed people… It hurts when you think you have given everyone what they want and you get 5 likes ya know? We have all felt it…
I was almost wondering if it wouldn’t be better to just have a meter to show how many people saw or read your post? Then at least you know people saw it and are still following anyways… It would seem that might be enough… then you still get some of that social influence, and the societal impact of altering behavior achieved by a social media platform by Facebook.
Or do we need our like addiction? Seems a little too illogical and unsustainable to me…
I could maybe see like a special occasion post that could receive likes… a list of special occasions that when posted could receive the different emojis and things like that…
Some things to think about anyways…
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