A world with just 2 emotions ( Like & Dislike )

Yes, Like and Dislike. Imagine the enormous strain on these two words (signs) to convey the entire gamut of human emotions amongst millions of Facebook users round the world. In any case considering that up until now, we relied on only one word to tell us the diversity of the human story, 2 words technically doubles that capacity!

All of you remember the inappropriateness of ‘like’ in certain kinds of situations. Remember the times when your best friend made a post that his father had just passed away and by the time you saw the post it already had already crossed a 200 likes. You wondered what that really meant. After all how could you ‘like’ the fact that your best friend was in deep pain, needed comfort and condolences and the world at large thought that clicking a ‘like’ button did the painful and unpleasant job of expressing your grief.

Caught in that rather uncomfortable Facebook trap, many overcame their natural reticence and reservation and took the trouble of actually making a comment because they were not sure that just a ‘like’ might well be considered downright offensive. So while on a normal day clicking the ‘ like’ button inhibited the need to make a comment or have a conversation, when there was bad news it actually encouraged comments.

So does a second button really help?

Let’s rewind to the same situation. So your friend has lost his father and the button ‘like’ does not really seem appropriate. Thank God there is a dislike button now. So you anxiously let your nervous twitchy thumb press the ‘dislike’ button.

In many ways nothing’s got better. You can’t really dislike your friends fathers passing away.

So what does the dislike button really mean? Are you saying you don’t like the post? Expressing some empathy with the negative experience expressed by the author? Or are you merely challenging the author of the post and drawing him into a controversy? It is possible that the more distant the relationship the more likely you are to use the’ dislike’ button.

Most people use Facebook for validation. When users get likes and comments on their posts from their friends they get positive re-enforcement for their actions. So Facebook provides a kind of co-dependency that doesn’t actually get enhanced in any way with a ‘dislike button.

The real question is whether a dislike button is a threat to the highly positive on-line environment in which Facebook operates. We will need to wait and see.