Most people have seen them, a lot of people get them, and even more people give them away.
To my friends and family: You reap what you sow. I appreciate and love you, but one can only ignore so many offenses before getting extremely aggravated.
Facebook’s Like feature came as a way of telling your friends, acquaintances, and your favourite people that you liked what was going through their mind. Facebook is a huge network, and is bound to have right about every type of person that could possibly exist, and while that makes the community incredibly diverse, it is also a perfect place to herd people into doing something. More than once I have seen an artist or the administrator of a page asking something from their followers – both good things and bad things.
Something I have seen on the rise though, has been people mimicking other people’s conduct.
I had noticed it was happening more and more, but it was not until a little experiment I made last week that I noticed something was definitely wrong. After noticing there were some people that made a habit out of liking my status updates, I decided to post phrases and comments that I knew were morally incompatible with those people: I was already expecting them to do it, but it still surprised me to see them act… they liked things they should not have liked. After poking and wandering around other profiles I noticed that seldom do people disagree with others, and while this might be attributed to friends being respectful towards each other (yeah, right…), it is pretty obvious that people have found a new way to stop thinking.
I would like to believe that in a normal conversation an idea is brought up… Some people will agree with it, others will not, and some others will voice no opinion of it; A conversation on the Internet is a little different in that there are people who have an opinion, lurkers, and trolls. Now, the Facebook behaviour I described is just terrifying: Forget having an opinion, Facebook is 5% trolls, 90% likers, and 5% lurkers/newbies/annoyed people like me.
So what is wrong with liking your ideas? Would you rather have me NOT liking them?
I would rather have people telling me why they like or dislike my ideas. After a week of having Christian-Catholic people pretty much telling me (see: Like) that church burnings and CP are absolutely cool, I have no doubt that either people just randomly like my statuses or they have successfully stopped processing the information I hand them out.
I can only hope they are just morally obscure.
LIKE…
Facebook nos está consumiendo
Good post! Ya gotta be careful with that like button, lol.