There are two (so far) linguistic idiosyncracies of social media that I don’t like.
1. I don’t like the ‘like’ button. I was reading something on Facebook about the death of a Canadian musician in grim circumstance and the grief his parents were going through. I don’t think it is appropriate to ask anybody to ‘like’ this sort of thing. It’s an abuse of a valuable word. Maybe there could be a button which opened up to give a range of options, such as sympathise, not funny, don’t care, and then ‘like’ could be one of the options.
2. I don’t care for careless misuses of the word tweet. In a recent rock obituary it was written that a musician had ‘tweeted his grief’ about the death of the deceased. Tweeting your grief is a ludicrous cheapening concept. It’s worse than sending a Hallmark Deepest Sympathy card when someone’s beloved has died.
One Response to I DON’T LIKE IT…
Point well taken, Johnny, but the reason Facebook et.al. channel us into using “Like” as a universal response to any situation is that it’s a proxy for “Buy” or “Add to Cart” on the commercial sites — we’re being conditioned to go directly to consumption, without blinking. They can’t allow gradations of feeling, as that might (heaven forbid!) lead to the cybersurfer not buying anything, a violation of the First Law of Reaganomics, doncha know.