Blog Bling

See that little blue icon a couple of inches down from my picture on the right?  It's my BlogHer decoration, kind of like a general's star.  If you want to see the post chosen by the BlogHer goddesses for syndication, here it is:   https://www.blogher.com/lazy-typers-need-more-button-facebook

It's the one about the use of "like" in Facebook.  If you're one of the kind souls who reads me regularly, you probably already saw it last March, and I apologize for sending you back to it.  But I've been urged by the BlogHer goddesses to publicize my tiny post all over the www:  Facebook, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter, this blog, Google+...

If I were really with it, I would also be spreading the word on LinkedIn, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, YouTube, and who knows what else.

I can't remember how long it took me to write the original post, but it wasn't nearly as long as it's taken to go through the syndication and then the self-promotion process.

I would feel that all of this was "an expense of spirit in a waste of shame," as Shakespeare said of lust, except that with every step I believe that I am keeping up if only with the rear-guard in the fuzzy, misty but implacable world of the www.

Tomorrow, I'm going back to normal.   I might even make a drawing.

"Like"

Originally it meant "resembling," or, as a verb, "to take pleasure in."  Then it morphed into a kind of verbal hiccup, a place holder while the mind caught up with the runaway tongue:  "And I said to her, like, who do you think you are?"

Then Facebook came along, and "like" went, like, viral.  It got a new opposite, "unlike," and an imperative, as in "like my page!"  I'm o.k. with being told to "love me, love my dog," or even better, "love my dog, love me."  But can I really be commanded to like a Facebook page?

The "like" Facebook button used to be a last resort when you didn't have time to write a response but wanted to signal approval.  But now that one half of humanity is FB friends with the other half,  "likes" accumulate on posts like drifts in a snow storm.  A wedding anniversary is worth at least thirty likes, a new profile photo fifty, a baby's first tooth--a baby's anything--as many likes as the proud parents have Facebook friends. The "like" reflex has become so generalized that I have even seen it in response to someone's post about mourning the death of a loved one.  Pelted by posts from morning til night, what can we do in the face of the gale but weakly like, like, like?


Facebook needs to broaden its one-click response repertory.  This might include "empathize,"
"congrats," and "envious." These would save us a lot of typing.  And we need something to balance "like."  I propose "hate," or even "abhor."  Maybe "yawn"?

I know, this social medium critique is making me sound quite antisocial.  But I will confess that when I was starting up my FB business page I shamelessly ordered my friends to like it.  They kindly clicked, and I in turn click whenever I'm asked.  And many times every day my finger hits "like" when what I really mean is, "your dog is adorable;  you don't look old at all;  I hope that dish you cooked and photographed agrees with you."

And when someone "likes" one of my posts I always read it as, "I live to read your every word!"