{"id":21025,"date":"2016-03-01T07:00:46","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=21025"},"modified":"2016-03-01T14:12:01","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T18:12:01","slug":"facebook-reactions-and-the-happiness-paradigm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2016\/03\/01\/facebook-reactions-and-the-happiness-paradigm\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Reactions and the Happiness Paradigm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Reactions\"<\/a>Facebook Reactions don\u2019t grant expressive freedom, they tighten the platform\u2019s affective control.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The range of human emotion is both vast and deep. We are tortured, elated, and ambivalent; we are bored and antsy and enthralled; we project and introspect and seek solace and seek solitude. Emotions are heavy, except when they\u2019re light. So complex is human affect that artists and poets make careers attempting to capture the allusive sentiments that drive us, incapacitate us, bring us together, and tear us apart. Popular communication media are charged with the overwhelming task of facilitating the expression of human emotion, by humans who are so often unsure how they should\u2014or even do\u2014feel. For a long time, Facebook handled this with a \u201cLike\u201d button.<\/p>\n

Last week, the Facebook team finally expanded the available emotional repertoire available to users. \u201cReactions,\u201d as Facebook calls them, include not only \u201cLike,\u201d but also “Love,” “Haha,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Angry.\u201d The \u201cLike\u201d option is still signified by a version of the iconic blue thumbs-up, while the other Reactions are signified by yellow emoji faces.<\/p>\n

Ostensibly, Facebook\u2019s Reactions give users the opportunity to more adequately respond to others, given the desire to do so with only the effort of a single click. The available Reaction categories are derived from the most common one-word comments people left on their friends’ posts, combined with sentiments users commonly expressed through \u201cstickers.\u201d<\/a> At a glance, this looks like greater expressive capacity for users, rooted in the sentimental expressions of users themselves. And this is exactly how Facebook bills the change<\/a>\u2014it captures the range of users\u2019 emotions and gives those emotions back to users as expressive tools.<\/p>\n

However, the notion of greater expressive capacity through the Facebook platform is not only illusory, but masks the way that Reactions actually strengthen Facebook\u2019s affective control.<\/p>\n

Although Reactions offer an emotional lexicon that affords more granularity than the universal \u201cLike,\u201d they maintain the platform squarely within a happiness paradigm<\/a>. Facebook maintains a vested interest in keeping the site a generally cheerful place. Advertisers post there, and it wouldn\u2019t do to have users who openly dissent against those who paid for ad space. Moreover, advertisers are willing to pay because users go there, and people feel (at least a little) bad<\/a> when they read disproportionately negative content. Keeping things cheerful keeps users coming back, which keeps eyeballs for sale and ad space more valuable. That Facebook designed Reactions based on content produced by users themselves is of little meaning, as the site has always facilitated a positive affective bent<\/a>. Engineers are therefore pulling sentiments from a user-base whose emotive expressions were already shaped by a precisely designed platform.<\/p>\n

Of note, alternate expressive options are only available after toggling or long-holding over the still-compulsory \u201cLike\u201d option. This is reminiscent of the way Facebook added more granular gender identity options, but relegated 56 of the 58 options to an \u201cOther\u201d category<\/a>, available only as an alternative to the Male-Female binary. Just as they\u00a0reorganized gender expression to reinforce cis-normativity, Facebook has now\u00a0reorganized affective expression in a way that normalizes cheer.<\/p>\n

Moreover, all of the Reactions, including negative ones, are signified with adorable emoji faces. These emoji express sadness and anger as a little bit silly, not too threatening, not too real. \u201cLike\u201d might not be the appropriate response to the passing of a loved one, but bulbous tears streaming down a banana yellow face feels downright disrespectful. Imagine posting a brow-furrowed Angry emoji in response to a friend\u2019s personal story of sexual assault. It\u2019s the symbolic equivalent of \u201cthat rascal!!\u201d and woefully inadequate for anything that provokes\u00a0real anger.<\/p>\n

The cartoonishness of Reactions is most certainly intentional. It lets people express a degree of anger or sadness, while easing the transition into the remaining lines of News Feed filled with cute memes, funny text message screen captures, and images of friends on vacation. H.L. Starnes once compared bad and sad news on Facebook to the candy river in the 1970s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film<\/a>, in which those aboard float through \u201ca bright garden of colorful sweets\u201d and then into \u201can ever-quickening barrage of lights and awful imagery only to emerge on the other side to continue a fantastical tour of candy making delight.\u201d Facebook Reactions let users quickly pause for something awful, but then seamlessly continue on their fantastical George Takei-filled tour.<\/p>\n

In contrast to the seeming expansion of expressive capacity, Facebook Reactions strengthen Facebook\u2019s hold on the overall sentiment of the site. Reactions don\u2019t just offer more options, but give users a particular<\/em> set of tools<\/em> with which they can efficiently engage bad news. It is challenging to respond to bad news. The person who shares bad news is vulnerable, and the task of crafting a thoughtful reply requires effort and can be quite uncomfortable. Reactions give users an \u201cout,\u201d and give Facebook control over how negative sentiments manifest. By encouraging<\/a> emotional expression through pre-fab Reactions, Facebook does not foster expressive autonomy, but instead, stakes an ever stronger hold on how sentiment takes shape.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jenny Davis is on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis<\/a><\/p>\n

Headline Pic Via: Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Facebook Reactions don\u2019t grant expressive freedom, they tighten the platform\u2019s affective control. The range of human emotion is both vast and deep. We are tortured, elated, and ambivalent; we are bored and antsy and enthralled; we project and introspect and seek solace and seek solitude. Emotions are heavy, except when they\u2019re light. So complex is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1753,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[18447,36465,329,942,192,10144,1239],"class_list":["post-21025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-affordances","tag-dislike-button","tag-emotion","tag-facebook","tag-happiness","tag-like-button","tag-reactions"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1753"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21025"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21034,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21025\/revisions\/21034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}