Another Potshot At Web Culture: The Isidious Evils Of ‘Like’ Culture

The basis of caricature is to select a few prominent features of a subject, and then to overdo them: a large nose becomes larger, a slight regional accent becomes a drawl, a nervous nose rub becomes a psychotic tic.

Neil Strauss takes the ‘like’ gesture, and enlarges it until it becomes a bogeyman that threatens to consume individual liberty and Western civilization. As he writes in the Wall Street Journal, a bastion of free expression on the web, [with my comments in brackets]:

Neil Strauss, The Insidious Evils Of ‘Like’ Culture

“Like” culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in.

[Oh, of course, people should be islands complete unto themselves. That whole notion about being socialized, and that we need to be connected to others to find the fullest expression of our inner selves? Or the idea that self esteem is rooted in the idea of being competent to deal with the basic challenges of life, which largely involve other people? Nah.]

Instead, we are shaped by our stats, which include not just “likes” but the number of comments generated in response to what we write and the number of friends or followers we have. I’ve seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers than they do.

[We wouldn’t want to be shaped by the social gestures of our culture, right? We should ignore that and listen to… what exactly? Inner voices? Our mothers? Authors of self-help books?]

Because it’s so easy to medicate our need for self-worth by pandering to win followers, “likes” and view counts, social media have become the métier of choice for many people who might otherwise channel that energy into books, music or art—or even into their own Web ventures.

[And after all, fooling around with web garbage is lower than books, music, or art, which are well-established cultural outlets, supported by Ivy League schools, unlike all that social media nonsense, (or street art, or any other artform-that-snobs-tut-tut-at.]

The same is true of the productivity of already established writers and artists. I was recently on a radio show with an author who, the interviewer said, had tweeted, on average, every 20 minutes for the past two years. Yet, despite all the time and effort spent amassing and catering to followers, as soon as a social network falls out of use, like MySpace, all that work collapses like a castle built of sand.

[Mustn’t get involved in new media when there is so much money to be made exploiting some established literary or musical persona! Oh, and forget that musicians and authors rely on other sorts of user feedback — like sales numbers or leader boards — from which they derive socially-grounded self-esteem.]

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm presciently wrote over 60 years ago that man has “constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built…. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.”

[Forget for a minute that Fromm wrote this over 60 years ago, in reference to the cultural strictures of his day, the peak of the industrial age. And let’s pretend he intended his words as a condemnation of today’s emerging post-industrial web. Please don’t connect these dots: whatever you do, please forget that web culture is an antidote to the monstrous machine that Fromm was writing about.]

So let’s rise up against the tyranny of the “like” button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same.

[How can you know what makes you different from everyone else if you are ignoring social discourse, and reading old books in some dusty room?]

Write about what’s important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you’re reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think.

[Finally, something I can agree with. But, what exactly has that got to do with the like button?]

And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don’t waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.

[Wait a second. I’m confused. You said “‘Like’ culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem”, but now you say that microblogging leads to quick fixes of self-esteem. Could it be that more microblogging could lead to deeper self-esteem, instead of just quick fixes, then?]

I reject his arguments, chapter and verse. There is no a priori reason that microblogging can’t deliver well-constructed arguments or insights to readers… or transcendent joy, for that matter. Just in passing, it is also untrue that street art is merely vandalism, or that comic books can’t express deep human truths, which Strauss doesn’t bring up, but which are the sorts of skirmishes that cultural elitists relish.

Strauss is a cultural elitist, a conservative who believes that the old ways are the best ways, and what’s novel is suspect, and inherently of lesser and — questionable — value to society. He is dismissive, and casts about for a rock to throw, so he questions how the ‘like’ gesture might conjecturally harm our self-esteem.

The Spaniards have a saying, ‘Que no hayan novedades’, which can be translated as ‘May no new thing arise’. Perhaps that saying would have been a more apt quotation in Strauss’ caricature than Erich Fromm’s raging against the industrial machine of his day.