Thumbs up

The nerviest part of my postcollege radio job was hitting the big yellow on-air button to start the broadcast for each day’s morning show. The feeling of pressing two fingers down on that button—ker-chunk!—came to mind after reading Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson’s Like, which is about the history, neuropsychology, and economics of the upraised thumb icon. Whereas punching the on-air button used to make my morning broadcast possible, clicking the like button has turned everybody into a sort of broadcaster. But have all those clicks changed the world, as Reeves and Goodson argue? Your answer depends, I think, on what you mean by “the world.”

Like is a smart and absorbing read from a pair of writers who were on scene for the genesis of emotional response technology. Their book’s small-bore focus on the like button contrasts with the work of more philosophically minded writers like Jaron Lanier and Meghan O’Gieblyn, who tend to use large metaphoric frames. Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now describes online engagement as a baptism, a quasi-religious engulfment. And O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine describes information as “the ultimate metaphor, an umbrella wide enough to extend across forests and cities, insect colonies and highway systems, computers and human minds.” But Reeves and Goodson zoom in on a single clickable icon as a synecdoche of digitalized life. This move allows them to tell an engrossing story without getting entangled in existential questions about the kind of world digital technology might be making—and changing.

Like manages to address readers with the knowing positivity of a TED Talk, a kind of performativity reliant on carefully phrased questions, anecdotes, and surprising findings. The book’s nonobvious findings begin with the observation that the like button showed up first not on Facebook but on Yelp. Coders at Yelp found they could use JavaScript to enable clickable likes without leaving a web page, an essential condition for near-frictionless interaction. But of course, the upraised thumb traces back much farther, all the way to ancient gladiatorial arenas. Although Reeves and Goodson don’t exactly settle what the upraised thumb meant in first-century Rome, they show that, in our own times, its near-universal recognizability makes it remarkably effective at creating interaction.