Having discovered that the Like button is unequal to the task of conveying the full panoply of human emotion, Facebook gathered some of the universe’s brightest minds to ponder a better way forward. Their decision: five more emoji buttons! Meet Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry.
Poor Like is still around, but has been rendered as irrelevant as the telegram. Who on Earth is going to hit Like when the Love option is right there next to it? Your friend who just had a kid or ran a marathon will never forgive you for devaluing their pride. There is no song called “All You Need Is Like.”
But there’s no song called “How Can You Mend a Crying Yellow Cartoon Face” either, which underlines the problem with the new emoji buffet: It doesn’t solve the problem of “How do I reduce my reaction to every conceivable situation to one click?” Because there is no solution to that. Situations that are more complicated than “like/don’t like” generally aren’t reducible to a single keystroke.
Yes, having Like be the only response has presented quandaries. How to respond to someone’s beautifully written eulogy for a recently passed loved one? A Like seems to indicate that you’re celebrating death. But doing nothing seems rude. Surely the answer is a weepy face!
No. The answer is: writing a little note. “I’m so sorry to hear of your loss” will do. It’s more than one keystroke, but it’s not a lot more. It won’t break you.
The weepy face is useless. To how many life situations is an appropriate response a little yellow caricature of anguish? Who would respond to actual suffering with something so reductive, silly, juvenile and vulgar? You won’t get far imagining the Sad emoji as a response to any major public or private event. “3,000 Dead in NYC Terror Attack” — click Sad? “I suffered a miscarriage” — toss a lil’ weeper in there? Even something as routine and reparable as “I got fired today” is too sad for a Sad face.
The Haha face? Not necessary. If someone posts something that’s meant to be amusing, Like is fine. Like can indicate anything from “I laughed my butt off” to “I acknowledge your attempt at humor.” Like works. Same with the Wow face. You caught a foul ball at the Mets game? Killed a zombie in your back yard with a rake? Made it through an entire issue of USA Today without falling asleep? All of these are surprising tidbits, but hitting Like is close enough to saying, “Consider me wowed.”
Anger can be used against you: Picture a potential employer going through your last five years of Facebook posts and thinking, “Wow, this guy admitted, unprompted, that he was angry on 562 occasions. Maybe he isn’t the guy I want patrolling a crime-ridden neighborhood/teaching small children/assisting me at the anthrax lab.”
Anger also carries with it a connotation of unreasonableness or irrationality, which is why it’s so much fun to reframe political opposition as anger. “Why are you so angry about President Muffley’s policy?” “I’m not angry.” “Yes you are.” “No I’m not.” “Yes you are.” “Keep saying that and I’ll stab you in the larynx.” Bringing up anger means changing the subject from the wisdom of a policy idea to the nasty rhetoric and probable threat to public safety posed by the wackos who oppose it.
Moreover, the media can’t be relied upon to be balanced in its reports on anger: Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent a debate screaming at each other like two senior-living residents calling for their Sanka over the din of a too-loud television airing “Murder, She Wrote” reruns, but they’re “impassioned” or “vigorous,” not “angry.” If Mitt Romney had ever posted a single Angry emoji on his Facebook page, though, we’d never have heard the end of how he represented “angry white men,” “the politics of hate,” “bitter invective,” etc.
So the only emojis Facebook needs are Love and Dislike, except Like was superior to Love anyway. Why cheapen Love by reducing it to an emoji? It’s supposed to be a special word for special circumstances, but lately, as a culture, we’ve been spewing it wantonly all over the place, the way Broadway audiences give standing ovations to practically every show. Such is the stagy, phony character of endlessly declaring love for everything that in England, emotionally incontinent actors are known, derisively, as “loveys.”
Darlings, let’s don’t let that happen to us, all right? Kiss kiss.