Don’t Be lazy … Like!!!

A key ingredient in the progress of societies, over the centuries, has been APPLAUSE!!! From clapping of hands, to guided laughter in sitcoms, to television ratings, to best-seller charts, to the now ubiquitous LIKE.

Applause, was an early form of mass media when all we had was hands. It helped quantify individual qualitative opinions. It was big data, before data got big. From muted to thunderous clapping, to standing ovation, to pleas for encore, it was a measure of sentiment generated by the performance.

The rapturous roar of the crowd is the biggest encouragement for the performer. 

While up to the 19th century, performances were limited to a few people, and the feedback, in terms of applause, was instantaneous (clapping), the advent of radio and television introduced new challenges for measuring feedback. This was solved with broadcast ratings, as pioneered by A.C. Nielson and the famous ‘’best-seller’’ charts as seen in books / music albums.

Internet and 21st century saw the invention of the, now ubiquitous LIKE button, which was made famous by Facebook. Like, simplified the wide gamut of emotions into a simple act of appreciation.

Today, the popularity of social networking platforms means that a significant proportion of the content that we consume is on Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, Twitter, Blogging sites and so on. These platforms are like a marketplace, which help the creators of content meet the consumers of content. The creators are no longer restricted to celebrities or world leaders, but anyone can now post “What’s on their mind?”.

Up until now, in any society, the ratio of creators to consumers was quite low. The popularity of social networks broke this cycle by ‘democratising information flow’. What these networks provide us with, is a great opportunity to access the thought process of a wide range of population, restricted not just to our friends and colleagues. The ‘like’ when combined with social graph (mapping the interwoven connections between groups of people) and the news feed (moving the focus from creators to consumers) has increased the reach of generated content phenomenally. You can now be sitting in, say, India, and read about the content generated by someone in Argentina or USA.

The advantages of this are enormous. 

People often consume / share / produce content on topics that interest them or they are experts at. And since different people have different interests and different expertise, the very access to the content created or shared by them gives us a huge opportunity to consume information on a wide range of topics and learn more. We could also do this by proactively searching the web and consuming information, but often we wouldn’t know what to search. What LIKE and NEWSFEED do, is bring a wide gamut of interesting stuff to us on a platter. It could be picture of self, vacation holidays, viral videos, memes, quotes, street photography, blogs, et al. Consumption of this helps us share others’ experience (through pictures and feel connected) or become more aware of varied topics, get different perspectives on the same debate, and widen our horizons.

Generation of such content needs to be encouraged.

So next time when you read a blog, see a picture or watch a viral video, on such platforms, at the end, take a moment to gauge whether you liked what you read or saw.

If you did, DON’T BE LAZY … LIKE!!!

Positive feedback will encourage the creators to create more content and for us consumers, we will have more interesting stuff to consume. :)