After a year of brainstorming alternatives to its trademark “like” button, Facebook has finally come up with a solution for users and they’re calling them reactions: “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.”
They are on the right track to making how we respond to certain posts more personal—as well as our feelings more accurate. Finally there’s a distinction between how we respond to someone’s recent engagement and their grandma passing away. These new emoticons will increase the amount of users who react to posts and encourage them to respond more frequently.
Typing a comment can be time-consuming and a much bigger commitment than most users want. These new emojis are an easy way to quickly say how we feel. They’re a means for us to express our reactions where typing a comment is not the most efficient option.
It should come as no surprise that since the recent release of reactions, some users argue that five new emoticons cannot possibly accurately convey precisely how they’re reacting. These users obviously aren’t wrong, but this is a step in the direction of being able to express how you actually feel on Facebook. Facebook is a forum used in endless cultures and languages, thus they need to maintain the universality of the “like” button.
But are these new emoticons truly reflective of how we actually feel? We constantly struggle to express ourselves on social media, so what makes us think with five new reactions, we will be able to express how we feel?
As Curtis Silver says in Forbes magazine, “These emojis simply provide another emotional box to place our true feelings into, without the stress of actually having to put into words what we really feel.”
We must accept that social media plays a very substantial part in our lives, and all the emoticons in the world won’t replace our emotions. This is a step in the right direction, unlike Twitter which simply changed its “favourite” button to a heart. Although they’re not perfect or exhaustive, these emoticons will better suit users’ needs.
