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| Edited By: Pooja Salvi |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 03, 2018, 02:34 PM IST
Graphic designer Vedanti Ghadi loves to share memes. On an average, she shares about 15 to 20 memes per day. A few days ago though, Ghadi shared a rather threatening meme: “If you don’t laugh react on my memes, I will unfriend you.”
Ghadi was straightforward: she did not appreciate a simple ‘Like’ to her posts. “It definitely gives me a validation of some sort if people laugh react to the memes I share. And that’s a given when you’re on social media,” the 24-year-old frankly adds.
Flashback to 2016 when Facebook introduced Reactions. An extension of the ‘Like’ button, Reactions allow users to be more expressive with their thoughts with animated options of Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry. “For more than a year, conducting global research including focus groups and surveys to determine what types of reactions people would want to use most. We also looked at how people are already commenting on posts and the top stickers and emoticons as signals for the types of reactions people are already using to determine which reactions to offer,” the social networking site had explained on their blog.
According to a recent report from Quintly, a social media analytics and benchmarking tool, post engagement on Facebook increased multifold in the two years following the introduction of Reactions. Quintly analysed 44 million posts from 2,18,289 brands from every country in the world from January to April this year. They found that reactions made up 12.8 per cent of all interactions – a 433 per cent increase in just over two years.
With Facebook users relying on Reactions to express opinions, they were slowly foregoing the Like button. “In that first reaction study from April 2016, the Like accounted for 76.4 per cent of all interactions and 76.5 per cent in our second follow up study from June 2016. This is surprising considering the new Reactions use had already more than doubled in a two-month time span. But this year [2018]? Well, things are a bit of a thumbs-down, with the percentage of Likes having drastically decreased to 61.2 per cent,” the report read.
Ghadi equates Reactions to feedback – feedback that “pushes me to share more relatable content and share things that I feel strongly about.” According to her, the quality of content in her posts has also evolved in the last two years as people’s likes and dislikes were gradually revealed to her through their Reactions. “It has given me the liberty to share openly without the fear of judgement – I know that my online friends are okay with so-and-so kind of content and I can be as open I want,” she says.
(Pic: iStock)
But this could possibly lead to a downside. Just as Ghadi expects her friends and followers to Laugh react on her memes, others expect a response to their messages – they do not like being left on ‘read’. The Facebook-owned instant messaging app WhatsApp has the ‘read’ feature, which tells you if the receiver has read your message and is denoted with two blue tick marks. The sight of which is a source of anxiety of 26-year-old Jai Kishan Ranka.
“I do not appreciate being left on ‘read’. The receiver can have her/his reasons, but a simple acknowledgement of receiving my message is enough for me,” he reveals. There are times when Ranka has had arguments with close friends and even his significant other around this issue – arguments that have only revealed the receiver to have his/her hands busy with something else. But Ranka reasons, “Why open the message at all? If you’ve got your hands busy with something more important, you needn’t even open the message to read.” The ambiguity around why someone wouldn’t respond to a message, no matter its gravity, is what baffles him. Even when messages sent to his parents are left unanswered, Ranka admits to going in a “bad trip” – wondering if he has done something wrong to upset them.
But is the receiver entitled to give a response or ‘react’ in any way?
“Tell me something, when was the receiver not entitled to a response?” he counters. “To some extent, the receiver is required to respond partly because of the age we live in.” Because communication, which is at the heart of this back and forth, is a two-way process.
Dr Nasreen Rustomfran finds herself in a similar dilemma albeit on the other side of the spectrum. She doesn’t like receiving greetings at the break of dawn or with the setting sun, but admits it is difficult to ignore them. “What am I to do? I don’t want to come across as rude so I either reply with an ‘OK’ or a drab thumbs up,” she says. Dr Rustomfran, who teaches human growth and development to students of counselling at TISS, apart from teaching health and well-being of the elderly and participatory training methodology, knows well that these are superficial responses, but questions the integrity of the ‘real’ conversations in the social media age.
Ghadi concurs. She finds the Facebook Reactions, which were only recently introduced to the photo-sharing app Instagram, which also comes under the Facebook umbrella, (allowing people to ‘react’ to 24-hour stories) haven’t exactly helped the concept of genuine conversations. “Lately, a lot of people have been ‘reacting’ to my Instagram stories. Barely a few weeks ago, these were the same people who used to comment on my stories [which are received as Direct Messages], write entire paragraphs that led to immersive discussions. That has now toned down to mere laugh-love-wow reacts,” she says. And in many ways, the graphic designer finds the process more as a restrictive mode of communication than expressive (what Facebook’s intention originally was).
Perhaps the art of writing love letters is one step closer to being forgotten as Reactions rarely leave scope for a comprehensive conversation. “I was talking to this one guy on Instagram; I liked him. We used to have conversations through my stories, which have now have gone down to Reactions. It feels as with just one touch, kaam nipta diya [get the job done]. Any potential communication could never be explored,” she laments.
When we constrict our emotional vocabulary to five words or ‘reactions’ that are used on a day-to-day basis, do we also constrict our mental power with it? And with due time, does the brain get stuck with the mundane?
“Yes, we constrict our ability to express emotions,” says Dr Rustomfran.
“Anger has many different ways of expression. Mild anger can be irritation or frustration,” she elaborates adding that anger is a strong word and doesn’t exactly convey the magnitude of the feeling. “Emotional words should be learnt. When we teach people positive mental health, we actually give them words and words to describe feelings,” she elaborates.
The TISS lecturer offers an example of how people are prone to respond to emotion-based questions. “When I once asked someone how they are feeling, they replied with, ‘I think it’s quite bad/ very warm day.’ My question was how they ‘felt’, so they had to respond with options like ‘I’m feeling hot, warm, uncomfortable, and/or irritable. But they responded with a superficial ‘it is a bad day’.”
She adds how important it is to articulate feelings and keeping the mind from atrophying. “When you ask ‘feeling’ words, people give you their thoughts. When we want people to have a grip over their mental health, we want them to use words as close as what they’re feeling – articulate it properly. So a word like ‘awesome’ is very superficial. I can pass off any conversation today, where I’m really not interested, and say ‘Awesome! Oh really? Awesome!’ I can say this three times and the other person thinks I’m agreeing with them; when I’m only passively responding. I just want to show you I responded – the quality behind the response is not considered.
“People use masks and cover-ups as responses,” she says.
‘Authentic dialogue’ is a two-way conversation, which relies on ‘feedback’ than ‘reaction’. “When you say what you’re feeling, you leave room for a response and not a reaction,” Dr Rustomfran explains.
But here is where Dr Shilpa Karia, who runs a brain fitness centre in Mumbai’s Lower Parel, finds the loophole. “Today, people are finding it very difficult to convey how they really feel,” she laments. Those who walk in asking for help are offered step-by-step guidance and activities over a period of time that train the brain to spell out the correct emotions, explains Dr Karia.
How then does authentic dialogue happen? If you are ‘reacting’ a lot, you could try commenting the next time. While a comment could also be a passive attempt, conveying your feelings, thoughts and ideas in an elaborate manner can help.
Perhaps this is exactly the tragedy of the appropriate response: there is no such thing.
