Twitter’s change from favourites to Likes/hearts is typical of this ‘embrace everything’ culture

<3?

One of Twitter's suggested definitions (Twitter)

Before we go any further, let’s just get it out the way that yes, I am genuinely writing an opinion piece on the change in design of a button on the internet, and yes, I realise how ridiculous that is.

But so was the absolute tide of tweets given over to the change today, which seemed motivated by a combination of boredom, posturing, self-parody and, I think, legitimate and relevant discussion of the way we interact.

It’s easy to laugh off the abbreviations of phrases, the eeeeeeeeelongating of words, the use of emoji and the methods of approving an online utterance, but they’re as sociologically interesting in terms of the way we communicate as changes to language were pre-internet. Please. I’m being deadly serious here. When people are writing period pieces about the 2010s in a hundred years time (if that’s still a thing), they’ll probably #delight in tha way we talkkkkkk as much as we do in early 20th-century phrasing.

The expected switches from stars to hearts, Faves to Likes, however you want to think of it, got the following explanation from Twitter:

‘The heart is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones. The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people.’

The heart symbol actually doesn’t have range though does it, it’s just “LOVE THIS”. It’s just “OMG, THIS IS EVERYTHING”.

It’s indicative of a culture in which everything must be embraced, in which BuzzFeed refuse to run negative reviews and in which any and all criticism is dismissed out of hand as “hating”. I’m not calling for Dislikes and Broken Hearts, but a Twitter that didn’t look like it had been enthusiastically stamped by a 7-year-old with a Hello Kitty marker selection would be nice.

‘You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite,’ Twitter said of the jettisoning of its fave stars (RIP Favstar, btw), but no-one ever really saw them that way.

No-one who faved “cool, will check it out” or similar was trying to declare this the greatest sentence ever written, they were just acknowledging it. The fave meant everything and nothing, used for a variety of reasons and without any real meaning. It was Schrödinger’s f***ing social media button, I’m telling you, simultaneously imbued with unblemished praise and lexicological vacuum.

Anyway, I’ll stop now. By the time I've written this, Twitter, the working model of the infinite number of monkeys, typewriters theory, will have thankfully already made every possible joke and interpretation and blown itself out anyway. I Like it.