Yet another article about Facebook’s likes? Oh, noes. Oh, yes! Here the question at hand is very simple: why should anyone tell the world (or at least his “friends”) that he’s going to ride his bicycle today? Or that he bought a new issue of Batman? Or that rainy Mondays suck? Triviality dominates Facebook, and it’s hard to avoid this pitfall.
Essentially what I noticed – what actually sparked my interest – are statements like “Today’s a sunny day: I’m happy!” receive a lot of likes, while links to interesting articles or papers are often passed over. Why? One answer is everybody loves to share lolcats, while just a small number of people read profound and challenging articles. That’s understandable – triviality has always been part of mankind’s speech. But the status problem is something more complicated than simply assuming that the masses are attracted by stupidity.
A more refined answer may be that platitudes are favored because of their universality and likability. Daily commonplace is chosen as a matrix of digital pleasure and approval. Much more than the necessity to pry, the issue here is the necessity to say that a triviality is O.K.
Jonathan Franzen unveiled this mechanism in a moving article from The New York Times, titled Liking is for cowards, go for what hurts. To quote him directly:
A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)
But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.
Franzen is right. To like is definitely the commercial culture’s substitute for loving. Then again, one has to ask why.
First of all, the infosphere can be a very lonely planet. Maybe not in the classical sense, as the following phrases have been said billions of times: “Get yourself a life,” “Get off the computer screen and go outside,” and “Friends on the web aren’t real” (Actually, when I talk to my friends via Facebook, they very much are real – they’re people, not virtual avatars). Here there’s much more at stake. Namely, the idea that information tends not only to augment, but also to call for increasingly more attention. What we may call the “alt-tab anxiety” – the relentless urge to multitask, over-perform, have loads of information under control – is a clear example of how the infosphere is self-devouring, and how we risk to lose our grip on a hyper-complicated environment.
In such a perspective, triviality and likes offer an easy way out. People are simple – they like to hate Mondays, and they appreciate when it’s sunny, and they like to “like.” So when Franzen urges for regaining one’s integrity, I think he urges for a renewed humanism. To put it bluntly, to “like” a banal status is to lose a small piece of our dignity.
But there’s more – besides diluting our sentimental life, liking what is trivial makes us numb to reality.
Facebook statuses are just brief sentences. Their objective is to announce and not to argue. They are not a real starting point for discussions, rather a platform for approval (or useless insults). In the end, they become their own digital literary genre; a limited number of characters, the statement prominently displayed next to one’s name and picture, and assertive at any cost.
Sometimes critics dismiss discussions on Facebook as “bar-like” conversations. In my opinion, an average discussion at a bar is deeper than a few lines commenting one’s status. Why? Because it’s oral and not bound to a box – nobody would smile and answer “Oh, I like it!” if you say you hate Mondays. They would just shrug, or tell you that everybody has since the beginning of time. Nothing new.
Approving and liking the trivial tends to make us childish in the worst sense of the word. The real issue is not that we open our hearts to the world (including people we don’t know) on Facebook. The real issue is our hearts become numb, and the complexity of our experiences lose value.
Being trivial is not a danger in itself, of course, but it’s a risky style if we use it everyday. It makes us perceive language and experience as an oversimplified organism. Every short sentence is treated like the ultimate and simplified representation of the world. Yet this is utterly impossible. If you collect all the statuses of all people on earth, you do not get the description of humanity’s average mood, and most of all you don’t even make a dent in comprehending its complexity.
It’s really hard to gauge the impact of this tendency – and I might be accused of being too pessimistic, for sure – but at least it’s worth highlighting especially because this phenomenon often goes unnoticed. Franzen’s cry is the mark of a great novelist who doesn’t surrender to the banal, who doesn’t want to pollute the infosphere, and still relies on great narrations and their capability to explain humanity’s complex beauty.
Outside of the narrow cage of statuses, reality is incredibly much more complicated. Happiness and sorrow deserve to be credited with a vibrant and purposeful language. The black and white alternatives given in a few characters, along with associating your name and picture the immediate phrase that pops up to your mind can help to numb your brain to the information overload. It’s a buoy of common sense where everything is clearly defined.
Yet this is not the real world. We are not here to “like” without feeling – we are here to live our experiences.
_____
💬 Discussion
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!