Love Language Online: Ideology of Likes

I was scrolling through my Instagram feed the other day, looking at all of the people’s photos I follow. Some of the users I follow are sports related, celebrities or just funny pictures. But majority of the people I follow are people that I actually know in real life. As I was mindlessly scrolling through the feed, I came to a realization that my body naturally acts a certain way. For every one of my friend’s photos, I would “Like” them unconsciously. As Instagram has a setting in their application where you can look at all of the pictures you’ve liked ever, I decided to check it out. To my surprise, I’ve “Liked” every single of my friend’s photos while ignoring photos that belonged to celebrities and companies. I’ve even “Liked” one of my friend’s mass posts of her cats even though personally, it is one of my pet peeves (pun not intended). So I thought to myself, why and when did this become a norm?

Over the years, the advancement of technology and the domination of the Internet has changed the whole concept of sharing. Christian Fuchs mentions in his text Social Media: A Critical Introduction 2nd Edition that,

Sharing is a positively connoted term. We share our feelings of happiness and grief with friends and loved ones. We share a bottle of wine as a gift. Love is about altruistic sharing of space and time along with very strong positive feelings. Sharing is a positive emotional activity (284).

Sharing has been a concept of sympathy and love before Internet was ever a thing. In preschool, we are taught the phrase “Sharing is Caring” and are expected to follow it because it is the right thing to do. But with the advancement of technology, the Internet has changed the value of sharing. It has changed the way we communicate and how we respond when things are shared to us. The Internet has changed our whole language and how we socialize with one another.

I received a call from a friend the other day. That particular day I had a bad day at work, and on top of that also had to drive through two hours of traffic to get home. The friend that called me just came to the States from Japan and just wanted to see what I was up to. He called me to ask me a simple question on what the name of the restaurant we went when I came to visit him. I answered and since the conversation didn’t seem like it was going anywhere, we both ended the call. I thought to myself, why couldn’t he have just texted me this? Like the whole concept of “Liking” your friend’s photos on Instagram, media enforces certain ideologies that affect our way of thinking and living. Ilana Gershon mentions in her article “Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Media Switching and Media Ideologies” that,

This quantity has affected Americans’ beliefs, attitudes, and strategies about a single medium (i.e., their media ideology), which is shaped by all the media already present in their media ecologies (for a discussion of contemporary media ecologies (389)

It is interesting to see that we decide to follow these ideologies that were not created by a single individual nor through a law that was enforced by the government. That we decide to follow the hegemonic views because of the fear that comes with it when you don’t. That social media has changed our whole perspective of sharing and has changed how we think, how we act, and how we communicate. When did it happen when a value of an icon became much more important than a physical interaction? When did social media change our language, our love language.