A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

by Cal Newport

A more modern example of technological determinism is the introduction of the Like button to Facebook. As revealed by contemporaneous blog posts written by the design team, the original purpose of this feature was to clean up the comments below users’ posts. Facebook engineers noticed that many such comments were simple positive exclamations, like “cool” or “nice.” They figured that if those could instead be captured by clicking Like, the comments that remained would be more substantive. The goal of this tweak, in other words, was a modest improvement, but they soon noticed an unexpected side effect: users began spending more time on the service. As became clear in retrospect, incoming Likes provide users with an uneven stream of social approval indicators—bits of evidence that other people are thinking about you. The idea that every tap of the Facebook app might give you new information about these indicators hijacked ancient social drives in the human brain and made the platform suddenly significantly more appealing. Whereas people used to log on to Facebook occasionally to see what their friends were up to, they were now more likely to check in constantly throughout the day to see how much approval their latest posts had generated.