As I promised, I’d think about liking. And so it came to pass that I did. For weeks I pondered about liking. I have come to realize that the “like” has a lot of aspects to it. I’ve been thinking about liking. How liking things helps us make sense of the world surrounding us. In a way, what we like defines us. If you are surrounded by things that you like, does it make you happy? I can imagine it will, so we tend to collect likable things and people around us. So we can create a personal utopia, built out of the things we like. We teach our kids to like certain things, so that we can share the pleasure of our liking. We meet new people and friends in places we like. Or we go to places people we like, like. Liking is emotion. 

On the internet, or in the virtual world if you will, emotion is much more difficult to show or understand then in the real world. This is why we invented the emoticon. So we can show our emotions. Help people interpret that what we typed on our screen was meant as sarcastic for instance. Or adding a smiley face to show we like what someone has typed. Also we tend to overstate our emotion(I might be culturally challenged, as I am from a more rational part of the world) by using abbreviations as LOL or ROFL. I’ve angry faced people typing that they are Rolling on the floor with laughter. Does that make them liars? I don’t think so.  People create their virtual world avatar and I think people get so immersed in their avatar that their physical real world self transfers their emotions to cyber emotions. There obviously is a strong link between their virtual avatar and their true identity, although I think this depends on the context of the platform your avatar operates on. A Facebook avatar is much closer to a real person, then a World of Warcraft avatar. Therefore I think that the things you like on Facebook are really close to things you like in real life. An invisible connection between your real self and your avatar is formed in this way. 

Liking on Facebook is a way to show other people the things we like about each other and the (virtual) world around us. In a sense, by liking things we try to define the world around us and by sharing it with our “friends” we try to give them a reason to like us more. One might even say we “like” to achieve a greater level of happiness.  And because liking on Facebook and in real life are so similar, you might say that the like-button is one of the first ways to emote crossmedial. For us rational northern Europeans it’s a relief to have a channel we can clinically share our emotions. In this way Facebook has become a kind of Demilitarized zone for our emotions. You can show them, add them,edit them or delete them, so liking on facebook is often much better thought through then our impulsive emotional reactions to real world stimuli.

So I guess by liking liking, we are able to show people around us how we perceive the world. We show them how we make sense of the chaos surrounding us. I’ve found out more about my friends then I’d have liked. Now I can see their imperfections, their incompatibility with my likes. This doesn’t make them wrong or right, they just don’t know any better, I think I’ll have to be more convincing. I think I’ll call my friends likables from now on, or is that my virtual avatar taking over my “real world me”?

tagged with: emotions, social media, like, facebook