Now that We Have “Reactions,” Will We Finally Stop Liking Gun Violence?
“But, not everything in life is Likable.” So begins Geoff Teehan, Product Design Director for Facebook, in a medium.com piece introducing us all to Facebook Reactions. On February 24, 2016 the company finally offered an update to the “Like” feature, reacting to the growing user demand for more post engagement options. Now, if we don’t like a post, we don’t have to unfollow the person after their 1,000th baby picture upload or depressing dinner-plate selfie — we can tell them to stop! Now, we can express like, love, haha, wow, sad, and mad.
Teehan penned a wonderful story of technological innovation and triumph, rhetorically turning Facebook’s product update into our wish granted. I’m wont to believe that Reactions is the genuine result of company chairman Mark Zuckerberg “conceding” to market demand, and setting about on what wired.com’s Liz Stinson calls a “mission.” Like all missions, this one met with a variety of challenges that included ensuring the additional Reactions would be universally applicable across geography, social demographic, and technological prowess. One way Facebook achieved this universal applicability was through a focus on visualizing expressivity as opposed to static symbols that relied on physical human features (that divide us in the social world). Reaction emojis now jump for joy or grimace with anger, just like us — all of us. Additionally, these challenges had to be overcome in a way that would not interfere with the classic Facebook “Like” that we’ve come to, well, like. Take a look at both Teehan’s and Stinson’s posts. They tell a story of brilliant, motivated minds coming together to solve a problem. You’ll probably like them.
“But, not everything in life is Likable.”
Neither do we like sharing everything we like.
This semester, I’m teaching a new course at Lehigh University called “Engineering the Impossible.” My students and I are trying to bring to bear engineering’s problem-solving focus on the application of humanistic values within society. We’re also exploring how programmatic, policy, and product decisions are made, the ones that involve where we as individuals, nations, and corporations spend our resources (human, temporal, and economic), and how we decide which problems we prioritize.
Leaving class, walking back to my office, I passed no fewer than three of these:
My warm, celebratory reaction to Teehan’s “Reactions” quickly gave way to frustration: “Uggh. I wish Facebook would solve a problem that really matters!”
What if we approached mass shootings and our culture of violence as an engineering problem, as in a problem needing engineers, programmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs to come together with a common goal extending far beyond any single user base? If Facebook can turn one “Like” option into six “Reactions,” why is it so difficult to address gun violence in American society? In other words, why is it so terribly difficult for us to stop killing one another? And why had Facebook — a company illustrative of macro-level shifts in power and capacity away from nation-states and towards corporate bodies — prioritized solving the problem of where to put our reactions to stories of violence ahead of addressing gun violence?
Though I wanted to blame Facebook for skewed priorities, my frustration went far beyond Menlo Park. Zuckerberg, Teehan, and their team were responding to market demand. They gave us what we wanted. I was frustrated with us, and that “us” includes Facebook and its shareholders. At one level, demanding that Facebook solve gun violence is a bit disingenuous, but that’s not what I’m suggesting (even if, by the sheer numbers, it is highly likely that Facebook loses users every year to American gun violence). Rather, Facebook’s Reactions are emblematic of what T.S. Eliot once called “an age which advances progressively backwards.” We stand as Americans able to achieve the impossible always, but always at an impossible expense.
I wonder if we Americans, have considered seriously whether or not we are working to produce the kind of “market demand” that might actually end gun violence? Sure, we may feel dismay and outrage when we hop on Facebook and hear of the latest mass shooting. But our political gridlock on the issue, and our near ubiquitous reliant on the all-too-impotent Facebook “Share” has led to a collective failure to think imaginatively about our reactions to gun violence, and what they suggest about our hidden “Likes.” We may genuinely despise these tragedies, but our reactions to them suggest that somewhere, deep down inside of our American souls, we must like the results — home-grown stories of brutality, debates over whether or not a 12-year-old’s murder by police was justified, a theatre of violence, a constant/chronic sense of just-the-right-amount-of-real-danger, the possibility that this problem offers for us to imagine ourselves as the courageous hero saving the day ‘if it ever happens here.’
Joseph Stalin is remembered as saying that one death is a tragedy; a million deaths become a statistic. In the last decade, over 300,000 have been killed by gun violence in the United States, and many thousands more injured. While in the last few years, mass shootings have become a near daily occurrence. We trade in these statistics as if they are as ordinary as sports section game day stats, turning ourselves into the world’s cliché. For comparison, imagine if bombs went off at Bryant-Denny Stadium, Ohio Stadium, and Tiger Stadium, all at once, one early November Saturday and everyone in attendance was killed. Were such an attack to take place, I have no doubt we’d mobilize all our resources towards a reaction. But gun deaths in the last decade have killed three stadiums’ worth of people, and we have done nothing — though some have tried — to engineer a solution. By virtue of where we place our resources and our voices, gun violence has become our single greatest spectator sport. And we don’t just “like” it. We seem to love it as much as college football.
“Like all good design,” Teehan tells us, “the process of getting to a simple solution is complex.” For its part, Facebook’s Reactions were made possible by recognizing the incredible importance of empathy. Only by studying how Facebook users feel and express those feelings was the company able to deliver a product that reflected our feelings. So I ask us all: Where is our empathy Reaction? Where is our empathy at all?
When will we finally decide to stop liking gun violence? Until we decide to stop, at least we now have the ability to “Love” our Facebook posts.
“But, not everything in life is Likable.”
Neither do we like sharing everything we like.
