Ten Contemplations on the Facebook Like Icon

1) Interesting. Everybody who “likes” me seems to be a latex glove fetishist.

2) I’m not pulling over, hitcher. I’m stepping on the gas. Oh no. Get out of the way!

Weird that you click this.

3) Who’s got your nose?

4) If this hand were bearing an unbuttoned sleeve, everything you liked would seem …dirty.

5) The universal symbol for social approval in the 21st Century is a dismembered hand. I like that. But it’s kind of overkill. Surely just a single digit would do.

6) A grammatical sin is committed by our passive acceptance of this plurality of “likes” — that is, the letter S should be employed only when the subject is singular in second or third person (eg. “x number of people likes me” is an insult to English, and perhaps also the Welch). The Hand knows this but does not care, eschewing language entirely for an international symbolic system of hieroglyphs without the possibility of negation (or “unlikes”), but rather, dumbly indicating its opposition through absence (a Lacanian “lack” of likes, not present in the oedipal calculation). But where does one find, say, the middle finger in all this homogeneous idiocy? Oh, I see. Got it. Understood.

7) Clearly this stiff arm is really the pale-blue hand of an evil clown. Why does he keep following me???

8) You don’t like me. You’re pointing “gun fingers” at me. You’re either a sniper or a used car salesman. Please go away.

9) Some would say that this uncanny symbol means “thumbs up.” But there is only one thumb on this hand…that I can see.

10) I’m told that in some cultures, the “thumb up” is actually a gesture that is a provocative sexual insult. Gee, thanks everyone.

Significant related reading: “The Thumb Up”: http://bernd.wechner.info/Hitchhiking/Thumb/