Do you remember what social media was like before the "like" button appeared?
If you were on Facebook before 9 February 2009, you would have seen social media without the like button, but these days it's difficult to remember or imagine social media without it. A little later, the Like button was added to comments as well as posts. In the beginning it was so innocent. The people we connected with were our friends and we exchanged thumbs up on our posts to show that we liked it. All good, right?
Roman Odintsov via Pexels
What's wrong with liking something? Like has a positive meaning, doesn't it?
Condensing social reactions into the click of a button was the moment social emotions were converted into countable data. If my comment yesterday got 2 likes, but my comment today got 20 likes, then my comment today must have been better, right? Maybe it resonated with more people, or more people agreed with it. If my comment got 20 likes, but her comment got 200 likes, then her comment is better. The data proves it. So when emotion is converted into simple data, it became an easy measure of comparison. So if I don't get as many likes as I expected, or I don't get as many as her, or I don't get any at all, I feel deflated. The Like, which was intended to show positive appreciation and connection, became a source of disappointment. What's more, since we can see how many likes other people got, it became a KPI of peer comparison. And herein lies the source of many a mental illness born of social media. If I'm not getting likes, everyone hates me and I feel worthless. Initially, no reaction would have been neutral and a like would have been positive. But before long, as soon as everyone got used to it and liking posts/messages became normalized, the lack of likes began to feel negative. Even though there is no dislike button, the simple absence of a like can feel like a dislike.
(An important lesson is that we shouldn't judge technological change on its initial rosy impact, but how it will be used after it becomes the norm).
Not only can we see how many likes we got, we can see who liked our post, AND who liked other people's posts. I can see that Friend A often likes Friend B's posts but doesn't like any of my posts. Even without a click or mouseover on the like, Facebook shows the name of a mutual friend that liked a post. "Friend A and 23 others liked the post of Friend B". Ouch. This is another aspect of the toxicity of like comparison. It's very difficult not to give a shit about the number or the people who liked when it's clearly shown under each post/comment. One very fortunate piece of news is that, in Facebook, it is possible to hide the number of likes on your own and/or other people's posts. https://www.facebook.com/help/1223975091401139?cms_id=1223975091401139
After likes came reactions.
Although emojis became widespread in Japan during the docomo i-mode of 2001-2004, Apple's emoji keyboard was not made available worldwide until 2011. After that, emoji reactions burst on to the scene and an emoji became the Oxford word of the year in 2015. 2015 was also the year that Slack introduced reaction emojis for messages (aka reacji). This heralded the start of message reactions. In Slack, there is a large variety of emoji available to show your reaction, which added fun to work messages. So of course, other social media companies tried to copy this.
Facebook introduced 5 reactions in February 2016, Messenger in March 2017, Teams also released 5 reactions in 2017, Viber in September 2020, Jira in July 2021, Line in August 2021, Whatsapp in May 2022, and Outlook in 2022. Apart apps like Slack, the type of reaction you can make on each message is generally limited to five, six or seven emoji that appear when you hold down on the message (in some apps you can open up a menu to select more). Although it is true that the average person can only name three emotions (happy, sad, angry), the range of emotions that people experience and recognize is of course a lot more than six.
The Encyclopedia of Reaction Misunderstandings
Even with six options, we are still condensing a huge range of human emotion into a limited pallette. Second, we still have the problem that a lack of reaction can feel like a rejection. Now that you can like OR love my message, the "like" has been devalued. The like now feels more ordinary. There is definitely a portion of people who consider love to be akin to like, like to be akin to having seen the message and no reaction to be the same as disagreeing or disliking the comment. Nonetheless, like and love are both undoubtably positive reactions. However, most of the other reactions have the potential to be received as negative. Many apps have a dislike (thumbs down) reaction. Other common reactions are haha, angry and surprised. In the case of these types of reactions, the biggest communication problem is that it is not clear whether the emoji is a reaction to the poster of the comment or to the target of the poster's comment. Are you laughing with me, or at me? Are you angry with my comment, or angry with the target of my comment? I'm guessing that the original intention of the reaction emojis was to show empathy with the writer of the comment by adding an emoji that shares the feeling. In fact, they are also commonly used to react at a commenter, rather than with. If I complain that I got poor service from a foreign barista this morning, and I get an angry emoji, are you angry with me about the bad service, or are you angry at me for describing the barista as foreign? So, the first major problem of reaction emojis is that the target of the reaction is open to misinterpretation.
Another very common reaction miscommunication that I see is when the emoji means something different to the giver than to the receiver. This can be due to different cultures surrounding reactions. Reaction use may differ between generations, countries, and even just which apps you commonly use. Let me share a few examples I've experienced. A large slice of my colleagues will use the haha emoji only when they find something funny, while another large slice of my colleagues (in particular Chinese and Japanese) will use the haha emoji when a message isn't funny at all - they use it to mean happy (even though the mouth is wide open and moving). In a face-to-face reaction, it would be obvious whether the person was laughing or smiling, but not with an emoji. Though it must be noted that Chinese and Japanese are two of the languages that use the same word for both laugh and smile, so the language element might be at play here. When you send a straightforward work message that is not intended to be funny in any way, and then get a haha emoji, it feels really disconcerting and even rude. "Oh! What is he laughing at? Is he laughing at me?? What did I do wrong?" It feels the same as if you were having a serious conversation with someone and they suddenly started laughing. Eg. "Thanks very much for helping me!", "haha". "I'm pleased to announce that the campaign was a success!", "LOL". But actually, when you see the reaction through the lens of another culture, you can appreciate that it was probably well-intended.
Another emoji that seems to have different meanings to different people is the care emoji - the one where the emoji is hugging a heart - which was added to Facebook in March 2020. I would say that most people use the care emoji for showing sympathy - something like "I feel for you". We generally use it to show our support to someone who shared that they are experiencing something tough, such as a loss or a mental/physical illness. However, there is also a lot of people who seem to use the care emoji frequently as their go-to emoji. If I post a plain fact, or a positive comment, or an achievement that I am proud of, and then my friend reacts with the care emoji, it can feel patronizing, condescending and possibly offensive. "Wait, do you think I am in trouble? I am not looking for sympathy - this should be something to agree with or celebrate!". Again, after the initial misunderstanding, I can appreciate that some people intend this reaction in a positive way and there is nothing to be offended about.
I am aware that there are a minority of people who willfully cause misunderstandings with emoji reactions, and there are also people who give very little thought to which reaction they click on.
As might be expected from communication that involves sixish very simple faces, there are many possible ways to be misunderstood.
What kind of misunderstandings have you had with reactions?
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