Facebook's new reaction icons. Image: Facebook If you’ve been using Facebook over the past few days, you’ve probably noticed that the ubiquitous blue thumbs up “like” button has some company. Hover over the button, or hold it down on a touch screen, and you’ll be offered a whole array of new “reactions”, from cutesy hearts to a red-cheeked grimacing face intended to indicate anger. It’s hard to tell how this is going over. Sure, the fact that “liking” was the only reaction option for Facebook posts for many years (other than actually writing a comment) led to some fun possible alternative proposals: a thumbs down button, or even the more aggressive blue middle finger icon. But the opening up of new options, at least from my own experience, hasn’t led to explosive levels of adoption. Now, a group of linguists is going even farther, claiming that the syntax of the icons is deeply out of whack. Earlier this week, Wired magazine interviewed two linguists to get their take on the new Facebook reaction options. Their biggest gripe was that the words these icons represent are, syntactically, quite diverse. This means that the average Facebook user would have to expend more brainpower than a series of cutesy icons might imply at first. As the article states: “If you click 'Love,' your brain must autocomplete the implied phrase 'I love this.' Fine; just like 'Like.' So far so good. But things get weirder with the adjectives. If you choose 'Sad' or 'Angry,' it’s not 'I sad this' or 'I angry this.' It’s 'This makes me angry,' or 'This makes me sad.' Makes sense! But the mental gymnastics of tweaking this supplied context aren’t easy.” Huh. First off, it’s worth noting that the author of this piece basically disarms the argument being made here within the span of a single paragraph. The syntactic argument for the overcomplicatedness of Facebook reactions is that you can’t “sad something” or “angry” something. But, as it just so happens, you can be made sad or happy by certain things. But what about likes, you can’t be “made like” by things, right? Well perhaps not in English. But when you look at foreign languages, this changes. To give a basic example that probably everyone knows, let’s look at how you say “like” in Spanish: “me gusta”. Though this is the most common way in Spanish to say that you like something, from a literal standpoint, it doesn’t imply that you perform the action of “liking” something, but that that something does the action of making you like it. In English, it would be much more similar to saying something like “it pleases me”. So, with that in mind, “liking” becomes potentially much more similar to “sadding” and “angrying”. For someone who speaks Spanish, for instance, it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to connect “this makes me sad”, “this makes me angry”, and “this makes me pleased”. We only perceive it as syntactically different because of how our language is made up. But at the end of the day, all of this is a moot point. The real point of these lovably dumbed down icons is so that we can flip through of dozens of posts at a time and fire off quick, down and dirty reactions to them all at once. Because God forbid we put enough thought into our responses that we might actually have to form complete sentences. Comments are closed.
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