What is so powerful about this little button? I think the button acts as a Sign by which we are able to mirror ourselves to ourselves with maximum self-value and minimal energy investment. We always know what we mean or how we feel when we “like” something, even if the pushing of the button can’t express that. It’s like FB found a way around language and is now allowing people to express complex intimate values with the tiniest visual corollary of a grunt.
“Hey look at this interested thing! This is really exciting and wow it’s just incredible, and means this, that, the other thing… Wow check it out!”
“Grunt.”
This is what conversation becomes under the Like button. Similar to praying, one directs value into the void in exchange for a very minimal yet potent emotional-dopamine hook. Since the finger controls the “liking” a circuit develops between dopamine-hook and finger, which is really an eye-finger circuit. And an inevitable consequence is to push people more into their own subjectivity as opposed to out in reality with others, just as what praying does; it does this al the while under the guise that one is engaging with others and with the world.
A conversation is an engagement. A “like” is at best the drag off a cigarette, at worst a “fuck you”.