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. Facebook's Video Autoplay: Annoying, but a Possible Way to Bridge Cultures Across Languages?10/2/2015
Screen grab from "Dance Shadowstory", by Facebook user Hakim Fitdance.
Facebook's feature prompting videos to play automatically on user's news feeds once they pass them has been around for the better part of a year. And last month, the general consensus seemed to turn from apathy to outrage, as the autoplay feature ended up inadvertently broadcasting a clip of a gristly murder of a Virginia newscaster to millions of Facebook users. A Google search for "Facebook video autoplay" mostly reveals entries on how to turn the feature off, many of them dated from late August, right after the killing took place.
But since there are still sizable chunks of the global population who have not yet turned the feature off, it's having an unexpected effect: allowing videos to go viral regardless of their language. A couple days ago, I came across a video of an intricate dance routine that - I have to admit - caught my attention in part because of the autoplay. You can watch the video here:
But what really got my attention was the caption, which reads:
"Bonjour les copains, As you may of noticed, this isn't in English. It's in French. And since French is one of the languages I translate in, allow me to clear this up for you non-francophones: "Hello everyone, Hmm... Maybe in hindsight it's better that this text didn't appear in English, it's kind of tacky, though it just might sound profound if you're a sophomore in high school. But hey, maybe that's exactly why it went viral - people didn't focus on the text. Up until now, the main way videos spread across the internet is by being identified by text searches (identifying speech in audio is still a daunting task for computers). That means that if the text description for a video is written in, say, Swedish, it's only likely to go viral in places that speak Swedish. English may be the only exception; videos with descriptions in English are likely to go viral among non-native English speakers, since there are so many of them. But the same doesn't work in reverse; native English speakers don't generally find out about clips in foreign languages. In fact, a good number of native English speakers make a pretty good living just by mining foreign language viral clips and showing them to other native English speakers who wouldn't find out about them otherwise. I'm looking at you, John Oliver. But take a clip that is appealing visually, and automatically start it playing in front of people who wouldn't otherwise search for text in a foreign language, and you've got instant viral video potential. In the case of this video, it doesn't seem to have caught on yet with English speakers, but it's a hit among Spanish speakers and, oddly enough, people from Turkey, judging from the comments section: Now, I'm an optimist, and I also believe wholeheartedly in the benefits, and also the necessities, of bridging the language barriers that all too often encourage hostilities between people from different parts of the world. Sure, I find the Facebook video autoplay as annoying as anyone else does, but maybe by making videos from around the world go viral, it's doing us all a favor? |
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