What you'll do find here though is about another kind of "like"; the one you yourself perform almost everyday when you see that status message about one of your friend's fantastic day on Facebook, or that picture of the awesomely-cute-i-want-to-pinch-those-cheeks-coo-coo-coo baby on Tumblr, or its derivative form on Twitter, the favorite.
If I still have your attention after having said that, then let me continue and tell you why.
Simple. One, because I downloaded this one of a kind app called Fish, that turned out to be a tap essay about what it means to like and love something on the the Internet today. And two, because i'm a notorious liker/faver/bookmark-er/read-it-later-er who's desperately in need of this so-called manifesto about liking and loving on the Internet.
A few things about the app: currently it's for iOS only, it's free, AND you definitely have to get it. I'll leave the finer details of why it's so good to people who have actually put in the time to write about that like this, this, and also this.
Now, let's go back to the question: What does it mean to like and love something on the Internet today?
Awhile ago I told you how i'm such a sucker for bookmarking and/or for putting stuff on Read it Later, well, in my defense (and I know you will agree with me on this), the Internet is just a treasure trove of cool, good stuff.
On any given day I can chance upon a couple of pretty neat links from my Twitter (always), Tumblr (so-so), and I'll admit not so much here, which speaks badly of my contacts, or myself, for the kind people I associate myself with, Facebook. And that's not even mentioning the things I find on individual websites that I peruse at least 3-4 times a week namely, The Atlantic, NPR, The Rumpus, Mashable, The Browser, Brain Pickings, Thought Catalog, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and the occasional feature done by GQ, Vanity Fair, and Fast Company on interesting people.
Is there any wonder why i'm such a goldfish?
Robin Sloan, the author of Fish, calls this barrage of content from the Internet as an endless flood and points out that we try to stay afloat by liking, faving, bookmarking, which is all good because in effect we're telling the writers of these things, the websites that host them, and our friends who see them that this something that we liked and faved is cool or smart and is worth their time.
In a way it's an efficient system where websites get a feel of what people want to see, which in turn translates to us viewers being given more of the content that we care for. Why memes, cat videos, and the like are so popular is beyond me, but i'm sure this is the same system that is at play there.
The problem though with this system, as Sloan observed and as i've seen in my own habits, is that more often than not the things that we like and fave get lost in the jumble of the hundreds of things that we like and fave, and eventually end up in obscurity. This is particularly true for my reading list on Read-it-Later (now known as Pocket), which by now is a staggering 1188 entries long. Add to that the ones I have on bookmark and the things I faved on Twitter, and you get a huge mass of links, a couple of which I haven't even clicked on. We rarely return to the things we like and fave.
Sloan hardly offers any solution to this (I will not even make an attempt), instead he gleans on what he calls a path from liking (w/c translates to forgetting) to loving, which he puts in this single phrase, to love is to return.
This got me thinking about my own reading and viewing habits off and on the Internet, and it made pretty good sense to me. The books i've professed to loving like The Client, A Little Princess, A Widow for One Year, among others are exactly the same ones that i've read at least twice. The same goes for music, movies, and essays - I go back to them again and again and again.
Because when it comes to these things, liking and faving just aren't enough.
As corollaries to that definition he further offers that:
For me, on a practical level, this just means changing my attitude towards the things I like and fave. It means not getting overwhelmed and overexcited by the huge volume of wonderful things on the Internet, but instead keeping a level head as I remind myself of what I love, why I love it, and making sure that I give these things their proper due of attention and focus.
It's been said that anything less than mad, passionate, extraordinary love is a waste of time, this may be talking about romantic love or other higher expressions of love, but I doubt if it would hurt to use this same approach on the things we do on the Internet.
Try it too won't you? And see if it changes how you read and watch in this age of endless content.
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