Tag Archives: Values

What Does it Mean to Like Something?

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in General

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“I like this!”

You’d think a sentence like that would have a pretty clear meaning, wouldn’t you? If that whole 3 word sentence is a little complex, then surely the single word “like” must convey something pretty simple and obvious.

Unless it doesn’t.

But before I go on to suggest what I mean by that, let’s take a moment to note that that word alone is creeping (by itself even) into more and more of our public discourse. (Discourse? Now there is a word I haven’t used in awhile.)

It seems rather innocuous, the little “like” button underneath a Facebook entry, a Youtube video, or a post on WordPress. I can see another one right now up in Stumbleupon bar above the page I’m working on. I’ve long since lost count of the number of discussion forums that make use of similar conventions. Let’s not even get into the whole reddit thing okay! My point is that an awful lot of mass communication these days comes with the invitation to express our approval in terms of an upvote, like button, or some similar device. Ever greater portions of our news and entertainment now come with a prefabricated seal of approval just waiting for us to click yea or nay and thus to make ourselves heard.

…in a really limited way.

But what does our little click of approval mean? What these buttons mean to us and what they might mean to the websites that host them isn’t always clear. Often, the significance seems pretty obvious. You liked what you read, listened to, watched, or otherwise consumed. But sometimes, there is a twist to the content, something that skews the meaning of your approval. If you are reading a news article about a political speech you like, I’ll bet you are happy to give your blessings to both the speech and the article with a single click of a button. But what about a well written piece about a political speech by that fart-for-brains bastard you can’t wait to vote against? Well, then the ‘like’ button only applies to the article itself, right? …or do you refrain from clicking the ‘like’ button at all in cases like that? We don’t have a button that helps us to distinguish content from style or subject matter from the simple decision to call our attention to it.

And I’m sure most of us are familiar with the dilemma posed by a friend describing on Facebook something awful they’ve just experienced. Suddenly the like button just isn’t quite the tiny gesture of personal support that it has been for the last hundred or so mind-numbing left clicks we’ve executed while watching bad TV or not-quite-reading the  memos at work. So, you sit there for a moment and think about it before telling yourself you better actually write something this time. And since it’s significant and personal, you’re going to have to think about it and choose your words carefully. …dammit!

But perhaps there is a sob-story in this too

I have 5 minutes of time to kill, and I want to enjoy it by reading funny stories from my friends and thanking them for it with a simple click of a button. I’m even happy to cheer folks on when they tell me good things about their lives. But now one of my close friends has just experienced a major tragedy, and she snuck a note about it into this stream of otherwise happy-and-light fluff I am using for my entertainment. Now I feel obligated to say something meaningful, and I’m really not ready to get all emotional, and fuck I only have 2 minutes left before I have to do something anyway, and I have no idea what to say. Fuck!

Presumably this sort of Facebook entry would create a similar tragedy for anyone with enough heart to know just how frustrating that kind of moment can be. The social niceties of liketry can be very complex. We need a button that says; “I don’t really like what you’ve just described but I like you and want you to know that I support you in your struggles, …at least enough to press a button about it.”

On WordPress at least, hitting the “Like” button a little akin to saying “Hey baby!” It is often a way of telling someone you exist and inviting them back to your apartment. Whatever else the ‘like’ button means around here, it is also a potential means of hinting that someone should come visit your own blog, where of course you hope they will read and like your own material. …which is what one will likely presume when you see that they have hit the like button underneath your own article.

…unless it means that they just want you to come back and read their new post.

The possibilities of mutually re-enforced self-deception here are astounding! Sometimes I think it is entirely possible that nobody is reading anybody’s work anymore, online or otherwise, or even looking at the pictures. Could WordPress be a community of illiterate button-pushers, liking each other in one great big orgy of self-referential liketude? …with nary a word ever making its way into a single skull!

I can’t think about it anymore; that way lies madness!

I suppose the fact that giving gestures of approval may be a means of getting them back didn’t exactly begin with the internet, but sites like WordPress have certainly re-arranged the economics of liketry in new and interesting ways.

By ‘interesting’ I probably mean ‘just a little sickening.’ …yeah.

I recently got a bit of an object-lesson in what it can mean to ‘like’ something on Stumbleupon. You see, when I first started using that service, I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to set my standards for liking a webpage. Was it enough if I liked something a little? Or did I want to be a hard-sell and like only the very best of the very best? It really didn’t take long before I realized that there are real advantages to liking more pages (more followers being chief among them), so I loosened up a bit, but I still insist on somehow keeping a trace of sincerity to the whole thing. I don’t ‘like’ things that I don’t actually like.

Seriously.

For the first month or so I followed my usual approach of restricting approval to those things about which I could voice clear and unmitigated approval. I ‘liked’ only those things which I really did like, completely and unreservedly, from the bottom of my soul, …or at least my liver. I held back from approving many thoughtful articles on a range of interesting subjects because I had a problem with something in the third paragraph of this one or the specific language used in expressing a minor point in that one. Pictures on the other hand? Well, I found quite a few of them to be like-worthy, not the least of reasons being that I’m not a photographer. I wouldn’t know how to pick at them if I wanted to, …well not that much anyhow. The point is, that I liked a lot of pictures.

Of course the thing about Stumbleupon is that the site shows you more of what you like and less of what you don’t as you establish the difference by clicking those buttons. So, I suppose I should not have been surprised the that thoughtful articles on religion and politics answered the call of the stumble button with ever decreasing regularity, or that they had been replaced with images of kittens, sunsets, and street art. The more time I spent on Stumbleupon, the less useful information I got from it.

I figured this out when I heard a strange and stupid voice saying; “this site is useless for anything but lolcats!” The voice was of course my own. A moment later, I think I called myself an idiot.

At least I should have.

Because of course I had been telling the Stumbleupon site to supply me with frivolous content all along. Every time I hit the ‘like’ button I was effectively saying “more of these please.” And since I was only saying that when I looked at things about which I had few serious concerns, I was pretty much telling the software demons at Stumbleupon to keep it light and fluffy when they chose my content.

Once I figured this out, the remedy seemed rather obvious. If I wanted to see more interesting material, I was going to have to give a pass to the next pretty scene and (more to the point) swallow at least some of my reservations long enough to say ‘yes’ to a opinion piece or three. I made the adjustment, and today I am finding the material I get from Stumbleupon far more interesting than I did at the end of my first month on the site. I simply had to stop thinking of the ‘Like’ button as a sign of ultimate approval and start thinking of it as a sign of general interest, or even an outright request for more of the same sort of content.

Of course that wasn’t the end of my adjustments. I find that my likes page at Stumbleupon includes articles I really don’t agree with at all, but which I might want to read again, anyway, or to reference for purposes of one of my classes. Somewhere along the line it dawned on me that I could use my Stumble account as a kind of caché for anything of interest to me in any way. So, the ‘like’ button on Stumbleupon no longer means as that I actually approve the content at all; it means that I am interested in reading it again. Sometimes it means I dislike the content of an article enough to want to come back to it, …probably to pick a fight of some kind over the matter.

So, I guess I do ‘like’ something that I don’t like, which is a fact that I don’t like at all.

…I need a drink.

Lest you think this ramble is entirely about the trivialities of internet liketry, I should say that the whole Stumble incident has me rethinking my overall philosophy of likalism. yes, it is. I’ve always been reluctant to place my stamp of approval on most anything in life, and I can’t help thinking this business showed me something interesting about the mental landscape that produces this pattern. Perhaps, I’m a little to prone to hold a flaw or two against the overall value of an otherwise interesting work. Would it be wiser to think of my approval less as a pass on the problems and more as a sign of interest?

Perhaps.

Then again, I’m not much sure if I like what I’ve just written. I mean what the Hell? Somewhere in here I touch on some really interesting questions (or so I thought) about how the net skews our sense of meaning and commodifies approval, …and then I end up with this quasi-self-help lesson. I hate self-help lessons! Seriously, how the Hell did I veer so far off the path on this one!?!

If I were y’all, I wouldn’t like this post.

It’s Worse than That: Tough Decisions and the Tipping Point for Making them

03 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Animals, Philosophy

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I think it was a malamute, and it was in our shelter.

Did I mention that I used to work in a conventional Humane Association? For those that haven’t already read between the lines, this means I worked in a will-kill shelter. So, this dog that had just landed in a dangerous place.

Of course a pure breed of most any kind will generally adopt itself in due time, and we were fortunate to have enough room to give animals plenty of time most of the year. But space was tight when this guy showed up in our kennels. The dog wasn’t in much danger, but the kennel-space he took-up could mean the difference for one of the dogs who was. Keeping him at the shelter, at least at that particular time, could well mean some dog with less pedigree would go down.

A few minutes of googling and a few phone calls later I found myself talking to a woman who ran a rescue facility devoted to malamutes. After introducing myself I told this woman that we had one in our shelter and asked if she had room to take it off our hands.

A moment passed and then she began to cry; “I really don’t, but I don’t want you to put him down.”

It turns out this lady was keeping about 40 dogs herself, which is a lot to do without a paid staff or a dedicated facility. She might have had some help, but this woman was no professional, at least I didn’t think so. Like most rescue organizations and foster-care providers, I imagine this lady was doing this on the side, and I had little doubt that it was eating up her savings right along with every moment of spare time she didn’t really have. It was a labor of love, and her cracking voice told me just how much that love had already cost her.

I didn’t want to supply the dog that broke this woman’s back (or bank account), and it wasn’t necessary, at least not with a pure-breed (and malamutes are gorgeous dogs). A few more phone calls would land a home for this guy. And that is exactly what happened in this instance.

But that cracking voice on the other side of the line betrayed a stress common to those in the animal welfare business. Most anyone working in the shelter industry has more than their share of critters, some far too many, and every day such workers face the question of whether or not to take one more home. Even the hard-asses of our shelter took an animal home from time to time. One of my co-workers had a real menagerie in her small house, and with four furry room-mates in a mobile home I was pushing the envelope on excess myself.

It can be a very tough call, knowing that you can take at least one pair of sad eyes out of the racket and give it a loving home, but that you can’t take them all. So, just how far will you go, and how do you make that decision?

The part where reality seriously twists the knife for me is this. The line from what you can do about such things to what you can’t do is actually seamless. You would never know this from the way people talk about it. Asked to consider adoption, folks would tell me that they were at their limit or they would say; “I just can’t take another one home,” etc. But the truth is that most of them really could take one more in if they wanted to.

What people are really referring to with all this talk of hard limits is something more along the lines of excessive costs and overly onerous burdens. People speak of absolute limits because the implication that one really could do otherwise is disconcerting. It’s a damned terrible thing to think about (especially for someone who cares enough to get into the animal welfare business); but the reality is that long before you reach the moment you really cannot do one more thing personally to help, you will reach a moment when you simply don’t want to, the moment at which the cost is higher than you are willing to pay. Even with enormously high stakes such as the death of a companion animal, the point at which most of us will say ‘no’ falls well short of the moment when we really are at the limits of our ability to do something about it.

People simply aren’t machines; we don’t reach a clear limit and then go off with a great big clank; instead we accumulate negatives and increase our risks until one day we make the decision to stop, …and maybe take a step back.

Those that don’t? Well maybe they go clank after all.

I once knew a young woman who cared for forty something cats, countless birds, squirrels, snakes, lizards, dogs, etc. Her life was devoted to the care of animals, and if she could help, she would. In this woman’s case, perhaps the moment when she would say ‘no’ really was the moment at which helping was no longer possible. She was a one-woman shelter without a non-profit status (much less a staff). …and she was one serious illness away from becoming the next hoarding case on the news.

I can only hope I am wrong about that.

But of course the issue is not at all confined to animal welfare practices. What got me thinking about this were some comments in an article on Chick-Fil-A by Jennifer McCreight (the Blag Hag). the piece shows nowhere near the same level of stress that I heard coming through the phone that one day at the animal shelter, but for just a paragraph or so it occurred to me that she was dealing with the same sort of problem.

I could originally understand why someone wouldn’t boycott an organization that they disagree with politically. I bet there are things I buy that support things I hate, mostly because I don’t know any better, partially because I can’t financially afford to boycott everything.

These words resonate for me, both because they reminded me of the agonizing decisions folks used to make at the animal shelter, and because it reflects another sort of problem that I think about from time to time.

Suffice to say that the question of guilt-by-consumption has crossed my mind a time or two. I wonder how many of my clothes have been made in sweat-shops, how much the animals I eat have suffered, or whether any number of corporations I have patronized might have played a role in this or that political atrocity? …just to name a few thoughts that occur to me off-hand. Reading Jen McCreight’s discussion, it struck me that the issue of consumer politics really does raise the same dilemma that used to haunt me so much working at the shelter.

I am well aware that many of the products I would otherwise purchase are associated with activities I want no part of, but the question is what am I prepared to do? I can of course choose to deny my dollars to some folks in specific instances, and I can even seek out more information so as to identify more of these cases than I will get through the natural flow of information coming my way. But somewhere along the line I will choose to buy something the production of which involves real suffering by someone (or something) who doesn’t deserve it. I would love to believe that I will do so because I simply can’t afford to do otherwise, but that just isn’t literally the case, at least not in the particulars. If I, just like McCreight, cannot quite opt out of all the politically suspect transactions in my life, I can almost always do without this one or that one.

I could go on to discuss other examples, but hopefully the point is made. People typically describe our commitments in terms of limitations and boundaries, but our actual judgements are made in terms of priorities and opportunity costs.

Deciding the extent of our personal commitments to a given cause may not always be as painful as it was for that lady running a malamute rescue (and truth be told I think it is exceptionally difficult for a lot of folks working in animal welfare) but it is often a bit discomfiting. Our language reflects this tension.

…or rather, it pointedly doesn’t.