“identity construction on social media as a form of labor, and the role the idea of “authenticity” plays in extracting that labor”
“Facebook reportedly settled on these five added reactions after surveying what the most common one-word comments on newsfeed posts were, and after consulting with social scientists about how to accurately taxonomize the “range of human emotion.””
“So the company’s methodology was essentially reductive rather than generative from the outset: its assumption is that humans experience a limited set of emotions and Facebook need only reflect that with a concise emoji set.”
“This is unlike actual emoji, of which there are more and more being developed, and which can be combined or deployed to express new shades of emotion that there aren’t even words for.”
“With Reactions, Facebook seems to be imagining a pretty straightforward process: A user sees a piece of content; experiences a specific, discrete emotion that they can clearly identify; and then they “quickly and easily” choose that particular reaction from the menu of clickable buttons.”
“But every step of that process is riddled with complication. Nearly every word in that sentence warrants further consideration.”
“Facebook describes Reactions as giving users what they’ve been asking for. Here’s what the company said in announcing the change: “We’ve been listening to people and know that there should be more ways to easily and quickly express how something you see in News Feed makes you feel.””
“The “people” they are listening to are not just users but other advisers and researchers.”
“The “more ways” to react is actually a limited set, premised on the notion that users would rather click a button than use language to express their feelings.”
“And one’s feelings about some piece of content are typically a mixture that one may not be able to sort out: Maybe jealousy is mixed with congratulations; joy mixed with anxiety; a sense of discovery mixed with a sense of shame.”
“The design of Facebook’s Reactions repudiates the possibility of such ambivalence, suggesting mixed feelings are abnormal, atypical. It presumes we have an immediate, precise response.”
“finding out who will work those extra milliseconds to react is useful demographic information”
“Facebook gets more precise data about what emotional labels its users apply to what content, and how all that correlates to other user behavior, refining the company’s portrait of users’ interests and susceptibilities”
“Adding the extra options basically allows Facebook to extract more information about all users and more labeling work from some of them.”
“But beyond being a means for extracting more labor, Reactions, at the conceptual level, provides users with a kind of comfort zone for emotionality while the are on Facebook.”
“The menu of affective possibilities suggests that responding to content in Facebook floats somewhere between a “reaction” and a decision.”
“But the idea that with Reactions we are clarifying our “real response” lets us cling to the illusion that our “real responses” are rational and easily communicated in the first place.”
“In that extra moment of consideration that Reactions require, a useful space of fantasy opens up in which we can believe that the News Feed inspires us with a series of real feelings, when in fact we are suspending whatever complicated feelings we might have for the relief of just clicking a button.”
“Reactions offer the promise that Facebook is a safe place where we won’t ever be overwhelmed by unwanted feeling.”
“It used to be that Like was always the right answer. But with Reactions, Facebook is attempting to balance the Like button’s original mission, which was to radically simplify and amplify users’ impulse to respond, with the expectation of its clients — the advertisers — that it gather more comprehensive data about how users feel.”
“The Like was initially removed friction from online interaction. It normalized the idea that generic, binary responses could stand in for other forms of reciprocity. The quickness trumps accuracy or further elaboration of the potential complexity of those responses.”
“the genius of the Like button is in that it absolves users of the need to have true or complex feelings”
“Likes thus encourage a kind of mechanistic sociality that is more akin to slot-machine gambling than to anything that risks reciprocity: You post some content, pull the handle, and see how many likes come out.”
“The faster I can register a reaction to content, the faster I can put it behind me, and the more content I can process.”
“Facebook is not really in the business of “connecting the world” so much as formatting the world as data”
“Our standardized reactions to content are meant to make us machine-readable.”
“Facebook Reactions allow us to quickly exchange a few permissible emotions without requiring us to expend the energy required to actually believe we feel them.”
“By representing our personality as so many digital punch cards, the Likes and Reactions allow Facebook to generate of simulacrum of ourselves that anticipates how we might react to future situations.”
“This can create a hermetic feedback loop, where past actions fully dictate future potentialities, foreclosing the possibility of surprise or change. That is part of the pleasure Facebook brings.”
“When the algorithms parse us, shaping what we see and what is served to us, they make us into a product we can ourselves consume —we become auto-cannibals. We get to enjoy how well Facebook has stereotyped us and feel known, recognized.”
“And when it predicts poorly, we can take comfort in how that proves our ineffability, our rich complexity. It gives us an alibi for what we consume — it wasn’t my fault, the algorithm made me read that.”
“Or we can defiantly redefine ourselves in opposition to the algorithm, letting it shape our identity in the inverse.”
“The numbers we rack up — of friends, of likes, of followers — make it clear how we can use social media to accumulate various forms of capital. These metrics provide believable proxies for your social capital (who you know, who listens to you) and cultural capital (what you like; the value of your tastes).”
“The entrepreneurial mind-set that social media encourages brings with it a more intensified self-consciousness, a deeper awareness of how, thanks to Facebook, life is full of opportunities for strategic self-presentation.”
“Because social media supplies an ever-present audience that likes and reacts to everything, we have no sound reason not to always be performing for it.”
“To the degree that we accept that social media is about our self-expression, this makes the self equivalent to and dependent on the impression we make on that audience.”
“On social media “realness” gets conflated with how many reactions we can generate. If we leave no impression on that audience, we have to begin questioning whether we exist at all.”
“Reconceiving life as a series of chances for strategic self-presentation in social media radically undermines the old idea of authenticity. “Authenticity” used to be spontaneous, disinterested feeling, not efforts to get attention. Authenticity was opposed to “selling out.” Now social media situate the self as always already “sold out,” in that self-promotion and attention-seeking have been normalized.”
“Facebook’s algorithmic simulacrum of the self offers a compensation for any lost authenticity. It offers a new mode of authenticity through deeper forms of personalization: The more information you contribute, and the more of your behavior that is captured by surveillance, the more the platform can uniquely tailor an experience for you.”
“This helps justify the way we are increasingly watched: all the surveillance reveals who we really are to ourselves.”
“In order to experience or inhabit that unique version of yourself, that “real identity” that your data has delineated, you have to keep using Facebook.”
“To probe this self, we must consume and post more content, which triggers the algorithms to reveal that self’s contours.”
“Hence, being “authentic” in social media essentially boils down to “post more,” “like more,” now “react more.” Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you react to or what your specific reaction is: When the algorithms process it, it becomes “true to who you really are.””
“The perfect reaction, the purest and most authentic reaction, has nothing to do with any content at all.”