Slang Editorial :: Never Underestimate The Value Of A Holla'

Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Like

As does Jeffrey Beaumont

One thing I have recently come to enjoy more and more are the surrealist and almost exquisite corpse-like qualities of the Facebook "Like" function and the great possibilities it holds as a gateway into our souls.

As it is, "Status Updates" on their own are something of a small art form: life poetry on an empirical, uberminimalist scale. The best ones are even shorter than Twitter feeds, bringing new meaning to the idea of the "one-liner".

As stream-of-consciousness life narratives informed by varying wills to be "smart" and "look good", they say so much about our lives and our society. But the addition of the "Like" function adds a whole other dimension to these updates, as they provide an opportunity for an even simpler meta-commentary take on the lives of others. So simple and minimalist is the possibility for commentary that it doesn't even meet the reductionist bar of Boolean binary logic. That is, you aren't given a choice to "Like" or "Not Like" something; instead, you say you "Like" something, or you don't say anything: not yes or no, but yes or not yes.

And of course, none of this would be as interesting as it is if it these update/like combos didn't generate some truly absurdist moments (ie, example above). It's almost like the perfect joke: crazy/awesome 2009 life notes mitigated by specifically under-explicated thumbs-ups. It's too much, and I fucking love it.

Labels: case studies, junkjunk, thoughts

posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 6/02/2009 04:27:00 AM 1 comments

1 Comments:

elizabeth said...: i'm always a little shocked when someone "likes" a status update that reveals some anguish in my life - like this one, for example. whitney q. thompson, could you really be glad that i puked all morning just to write a sentence that pleased you? o, it's a cruel, cruel world.; 6/02/2009 02:07:00 PM