As of May 2014, there were approximately 1.28 billion Facebook users in the world. That’s about 17.7 percent of the population. Almost a fifth of the world’s inhabitants have two representations of themselves – how they appear in person and how they appear online. In person, your interactions are limited to conversation, but as a Facebook user, there are many other ways.
One of those is through Facebook’s "like" button. For every piece of information you choose to put forward, Mark Zuckerberg and friends have a counter that visually shows how many of your friends liked whatever you had to say. Some photographs and statuses don’t have any likes. Some have a few. Some have dozens. But recently, some individuals have numbers creeping into the hundreds.
More and more, you’ll see guys and girls with colossal amounts of likes on their pictures and statuses. Whether they’re professional headshots, selfies with famous people, photoshopped pictures in unnatural environments or just overall attractive photos with funny captions, there are more and more entrants into the 100-like club every day. But has “like inflation” turned a social network into a social competition?
Let’s first flash back to February 9, 2009, when the like button was first introduced. Before that, the only way to express your input on a picture or status was to comment. Then all of a sudden, a device was implemented where you could provide feedback with a single click of a button.
The like changed the way Facebook worked. Companies and artists found it easier to market their brands on Facebook, as the split-second process of liking a professional page opened the doors to a wealth of content and information. Media outlets would “trap” Facebook users by offering some sort of extra content in exchange for a like. Even Northwestern student groups have used this strategy – WNUR offered students free entry into a party if they liked the Streetbeat page in January, for example.
And the dynamics of personal profiles started to change quickly, too. The like created a quick and easy way to give input on a picture or a status without having to exert the effort in crafting a witty comment. With one click of a mouse, you had connected with the person who uploaded that funny photo, sending them positive social feedback in the form of a Facebook notification. Anyone could do it, and you didn’t even need to be clever.
“It was much more personal when you had to comment on photos,” said Caitlin Kelley, a Communication sophomore and member of the 100-like club. “People would only comment if they were actually your friend. Likes started out like that, but soon people realized it was so easy that they couldn’t find a reason not to like something. If everybody else is doing it, it’s easy to blend in.”
As people grow older, travel new places and try new things, it’s inevitable that they’re going to meet new people and expand their social circle. And these days, that means more Facebook friends – and more people seeing everybody’s photos and statuses. College students may have gone to camps, participated in youth groups and gone on trips throughout their lives, and it’s likely that they connected with the people they met online. But is that guy who you knew for a week on a trip to South America four years ago going to craft a clever comment on your profile picture with your new girlfriend? Probably not, but why do that when you can simply click that little button in the top left corner?
The end result is what you see on a daily basis – posts with hundreds and hundreds of likes. And you can bet that several of the “likers” are ones that have no form of contact with the poster beyond Facebook. Some of them may not even see the person whose photo they liked ever again, but they’re still factored into that like total.
“I think I have close to two thousand friends on Facebook, and a bunch of them will like any given post,” said Medill sophomore Arielle Miller. “Would I talk to all of them if I see them on the street? No way. It’s just another way social media has made the world a little bit smaller.”
With such a vast amount of people connected on Facebook, it makes sense that some go overboard on the likes. Facebook filters the most popular and active posts to the top of your newsfeed, so everybody will see the picture or status that’s getting a lot of attention. And if you see a photo that all your friends like, it makes sense to hop on the bandwagon.
This is how like counts start to get inflated. And while it may be ridiculous to view getting boatloads of likes on a profile picture as concerning, Facebook likes have started to become a major topic of conversation at Northwestern, and some view it as a competition rather than a forum for communication. Certain people start to become known as “that guy” or “that girl” for having a headshot with five hundred likes, and often times it’s attention that they don’t necessarily want. One student, who wished to remain anonymous for that exact reason, spoke about the subject.
“It takes up a lot of daily conversation and affects people’s self esteem in noticeable ways,” he said. “People have started to view likes as an actual basis to see how much they are liked in the real world. And the reality is that virtual likes don’t translate. It’s hard to reconcile that and understand why some people get a ton of likes while others only get a couple for posting such similar things.”
Sure, some people like the attention, and Facebook likes can certainly feed that desire. But this attitude forces casual observers to look at Facebook as a glorified social competition, and view the 100-like club members as winners. And some of those individuals don’t like the attention. This new competitive mindset of Facebook exacerbates something that is actually very trivial, and the amount of likes someone has can give a false impression of who they really are.
“There’s a shallow meaning behind it,” said Miller. “It takes a person a second to like something. It doesn’t mean they like you as a person, or like what you have to say. Who knows, they could have hit the button by accident. You can’t read too far into it.”
Studies have even showed that social media use (including but not limited to Facebook) is positively correlated with narcissism and depression. On one side of the spectrum, a 2012 article from The Guardian reported that “people who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.” Then, on the other side, a 2013 study showed that the more people checked and updated their Facebook pages, the more isolated and unhappy they felt.
So while not everyone may view Facebook as a competition, many are feeling like they are losers are winners, and it’s safe to assume that like totals have something to do with it. Getting a lot of likes can fuel someone’s narcissism and enlarge their already inflated self-image, and low like totals can cause depressed and isolated feelings. And all of this is a result of a process that takes less than a second.
Like inflation seems to be a phenomenon specific to college students, seeing as they have access to a large pool of peers and grew up as Facebook became an important social function. It is not, however, an experience specific to Northwestern. Many other schools, especially larger ones, have just as many (if not more) 100-like club members, and it’s a topic of conversation everywhere.
“The century mark, or getting a hundred likes, is a big deal for us,” said Saharra Griffin, a freshman at the University of Southern California. “People will be at ninety likes and talk about how they are trying to get to a hundred. Apparently, I’m famous for my captions at USC. I’ll always write these witty captions that make people laugh.”
Facebook is an important function of daily social life – it allows anyone to interact with their friends, family and acquaintances from all over the world, and connect with people whom they would have no other means of doing so otherwise. But there’s a point to which Facebook can control one’s life, and give others a false idea of who they are. Social media is only an online representation of a person, and what you see may not be the whole story.
“Photos only capture one second of your life,” Griffin said. “When you take a picture of your six thousand dollar Celine bag, people may get the impression that you’re doing really well. But in reality you can be struggling with things. Even I find myself doing certain things just so I can take a picture of it for social media and get a ton of likes. You should really just live your life and not worry so much about what other people think.”
So next time, think twice before you joke with your friend who got five hundred likes on their headshot. There could be something much more important in their real lives that you’re missing.