Continuing, at least roughly, the ongoing conversation about friction, CJ Eller hits upon a useful description of my earlier suggestion that there’s a distinction in value and worth between indication and interaction.
An indication is a noun. “How many likes did your post get?” is not a qualitative assessment. It is a quantitative measurement. We weigh indications by the thousands.
An interaction is a verb. You can interact by leaving a comment on a blog post, emailing the author, responding to a post’s content with your own blog post – the list goes on.
The key bit I want to get into is the idea that “we weigh indications by the thousands”, as it sort of gets to the heart of why I think we should do away with “likes” in favor of something more substantial. At some point the ease with which we can throw around likes and retweets turns them into just so much noise, and we transform social media into just another mass media where the indication of general popularity becomes the thing.
My pitch for reorienting people more to something such as literally having to highlight specifically what it is about someone else’s words that they liked makes a good deal of sense for longer-form writing, be it casual blogging or professional journalism, but it’s not especially workable to ask someone to highlight what in a 280-character tweet was especially choice.
I’m not entirely sure, in the context of something like Twitter, how we do away with likes in favor of something else, per se. We might need to just do away with likes and see what happens.
But anyway, yes: I think social media, and that includes blogging, should be not a noun but, in the words of Mike Doughty, “some kind of verb, some kind of moving thing”.
Addenda
- I do, in fact, get the irony of arguing here in essence that a kind of friction will increase a kind of motion.