The Lack of Likes

About our perception of social media and the people and words on them

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

When

Linda Caroll

pointed out a problem that is rather common — one we have all seen as social media users, it made me think a bit.

It’s about likes. And it’s about all other kinds of reactions that we can show when being active on social media. Because that is one of the social elements there — to react to what each other is writing or otherwise posting.

However, as Linda mentioned in her article, only very few people actually do that. In her case, a quick study showed that 6% of the readers clicked on like. But why not all? What prevents them from doing it?

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My first reaction was this (copied here from the original reply, as the Substack editor will not embed it):

You are right! It is a strange thing. On the other hand, we don't say thanks for the water we take from the water tap, or for the electricity we use. I know that these things aren't necessarily for free, but I'm just saying that there are things around us that we take for granted - often, we don't even think about getting them, they just slip into our lives unnoticed.

When you say that there is a limited amount of dollars to give away each day, it may be true also for thank you - we may get tired of saying that. In traffic, for instance, we don't say thank you whenever someone is not running over us. We just expect that, and even when people are almost hitting us, we don't thank them for stopping in time - it is more likely that we yell at them for almost hitting us.

Writing is everywhere. We take it in like we breathe the air or listen to the birds singing. At times we like it, but there are other times where we don't like the smell of the air or when we find the birds too noisy - or when we just don't get a feeling of "thank you" out of reading something, or what else we get or take from others.

All that said, I do find that we really should spend the second it takes to click the like. Because, why not? We feel better ourselves when giving, even if it such a small gift as a click on an small symbol. A symbolic gift.

What would happen if the social media platforms were opposite - meaning that like was clicked automatically, and we would have to un-click it if we didn't like the text? I cannot know it as I have never seen such a concept, but I have a feeling that you would then get 94% likes and 6% un-clicked likes. Because it may all be about what we don't think and do more than what we do think and do.

We read the text and like it along the way, but then we move on to something else before we have finished all the administrative things, such as studying the panel at the end of the text with different things we could have clicked on.

I tend to believe that it is mostly this. Like we leave the water tap or pull the cable from the electric outlet and then quickly move on to something else, already having our thoughts there, just hastily bringing our bodies in spatial sync with the thoughts.

Hence, there may be no statement whatsoever in the non-like. Just a moving mind and attention.

In other words, people do not think too deeply about the behaviour, and they do not experience each read of an article on social media as something so special that it calls for an action.

It isn’t something to say thank you for.

I think it is about the fact that this is media. It is not people we have in front of us, where we will be expected to smile, look at them, say something. Media, we just consume. Media is made by people who enjoy pushing it out on us, we think, so it is their song, not ours. Hell, they won’t even notice if we react to it or not, will they?

We feel small compared to media. Even if social media has given us all a voice, we also understand that this voice isn’t really being heard by anyone. And a popular post will have many likes already, so who will care if we add ours to the lot? Also, such a quick and cheap gesture can’t have any significance for a popular writer.

It also influences the situation that, most often, there will be many comments — and while the original writer may react to some of these, many or most go seemingly unnoticed.

In fact, it can be rather depressing to be a social media consumer. Sometimes, reacting feels like shouting at the football game we watch on TV. Nobody but the grouchy neighbours will ever notice, and they will not think good about us for it.

Hence, lots of reasons for not reacting on anything on social media. To those come the distance in perception that we have: The writer hopes for reactions after having spent time and energy on creating something, publishing it, and checking for results in the shape of reactions. But the readers see it as a few seconds of entertainment, if even that — they may actually find it stressful that exactly this post, along with many more, distract them from what they really should have been doing in life. That this post contributes to their doomscrolling and distancing from real life.

So, to the extent that there is a message in not liking, it could be that we want to show ourselves how little we like all of this, all the required attention to everything, of which there is too much.

Too much of everything.

Isn’t that a valid reason for cutting off some of it? And yet, we can’t. We are addicted to consume just a bit more, just a few more minutes, posts, memes, cat videos…

Being stressed of all this, we react in negative ways. We may even complain about social media to everyone we can find who have ears — or complain about the misery on social media themselves, often for deaf ears.

And we’ll get no reactions from anyone, because nobody wants to hear about our perceived negative experience of life. They want positive input only.

So they exactly do not react on our criticism of social media, because they find that we are adding to their stress.

In other words, we are all annoying each other on social media. It is the very nature of social media, because there is too much of everything, and we can’t cope with it all. Our only way of complaining is, in reality, to show a passive-aggressive behaviour by not supporting others, by treating them as part of that big machine that spits out tons of pointless information 24 hours a day.

The way to getting more likes, more real reactions, is probably to skip social media altogether and talk to people in real life instead.

Even in real life, we will see how people will try to maintain an own space around them, into which they will not just happily allow any statement made by others: they will be protective about that space, and they will balance what they smile at and what they frown upon. Also, if there is too much trying to enter their private space, they will ignore some of it.

So, even in real life, we will often speak for deaf ears, seemingly. But we can see the facial expressions of people, and we can often enter into a real dialogue with them, one where we listen to them, not just tell them things.

And perhaps that is the real, underlying, issue here: that social media often become a one-way attempt of communication, meeting the natural resistance to such, as people do not feel heard, do not feel that the other party shows any real interest in them.

One-way communication is part of the perceived fake nature of social media, which people often react upon. They simply cannot relate to others as human beings if these others do not behave like human beings. And that is not only about AI and chatbots, it is also about the lack of listening, the lack of rapport.

Which, I think, explains why cat videos, funny cartoons, and all kinds of lightweight, often humoristic contents seem to catch people’s attention better than serious attempts to tell something important.

It is not about wanting entertainment, it is about wanting rapport. Laughing together is rapport. Speaking to our direct emotions is rapport. Not demanding us to listen to complex explanations, is rapport.

And when there is rapport, we happily push the button - we “like”.