By BEN WIDDICOMBE
August 11, 2010, 2:07 pm
I suggest you like this article.
Please note that this is not an invitation to read it and make up your own mind. In language that will be familiar to Facebook’s 500 million users, it is a question with your answer already supplied. And before you ask, “like” is the only option.
Social networking sites that invite us to share our opinions have brought with them a new kind of pest: the coercive “friend” who wants you to shill their latest venture.
Like your neighbor, the folk singer. Go along with his request to promote his next gig on Twitter and you risk spamming your social network and coming off as a bit of a rube. But if you decline, he’s going to notice and it can chill an otherwise cordial relationship. Gone are the days of the stack of fliers that could be discreetly filed in the trash.
For those cyber shut-ins not on Facebook, the “like” function — illustrated by a jaunty “thumbs up” icon — is a way for users to add their imprimatur to anything another person posts on their page. You can “like” a picture, a status update or even a place of business. With that comes the now-standard e-mail prompt your friends will send when they’re trying to promote a project, the “suggestion to like.” Conspicuously absent from your list of choices are “don’t like,” “whatever” and “quit bothering me.”
At least the Facebook “suggestion to like” e-mail messages have become so common that they are easy to ignore. Much harder to handle is the personal appeal.
In the last three months I have received a dinner invitation with instructions to tweet my R.S.V.P., a friend’s request to change my Facebook status update to promote his latest film pitch, an e-mail message from an adult acquaintance asking that I tweet him happy birthday, and a message on Facebook from a P.R. firm asking me to “like” a link to my own story about his client.
Perhaps this is to be expected when you have friends who communicate for a living in fields like journalism, public relations and entertainment. But recently I received an e-mail message from a relative who runs a specialty food business out of her farmhouse in rural England, asking me to tweet about her new distribution deal with a supermarket chain. I’m terrified that at the next family reunion, there’s going to be a printout of tweets tacked up next to the usual gallery of clan photographs.
George Orwell would have appreciated the “suggestion to like” as a handy modern tool that takes the grunt work out of forming an opinion. So why don’t you like this article right now? Come on, all your friends are doing it.
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