Deconstructing the power of likes

Dear Millennials,

This is my open letter to every single one of us as the world burns in grief in almost every aspect. I know that at this point it is very hard to change everything, but I think we have something that can be easily changed that is accessible to our thumbs. The inspiration to my letter was simply that I was sitting at the airport and there was a Millennial sitting next to me, her actions towards her phone were the following: Click, click, click, swipes up like like like like like like like. The Millennial was liking every image she can find. Why? The basic rational is like as many so that they like my photos back. Let me deconstruct what your singular action is doing in aggregate.

The concept from my point of view is that today we are liking random content that is allowing for the rise of influencers carried with different ideologies, propagandas and ways of thinking. These influencers have discovered that the fastest way to grabbing attention is by utilizing inappropriate or negative content. (please watch Nas daily’s video on sexualizing content, I found it while I was brainstorming for this article.) As an example, today we have thousands of male / female micro & macro influencers that have entered the realm of influencing thanks to them doing their squats and abs exercises online. These influencers that have been categorized in massive bulk are now promoting their products and corporate products that are in most cases pointless and useless. There are several other categories benefiting from the such including fashionistas, tech bloggers and foodies.

The unprecedented flooding of this type of information has allowed for large companies to hide what other much better companies have to offer. Here is where I think the consumer has lost sight. Isn’t the point of accessibility you (the consumer) reaching to a vendor in Papa New Guinea (or any remote area) who has a solution that people with high marketing budgets don’t have?

Let me deconstruct more and try to give perspective in a much clearer sense, let’s say you Mr. / Mrs. user have been born in the 1960s a baby boomer about to see Neil Armstrong head on to lead the mission of landing on the moon for the very first time. Let us also assume that a famous newspaper called “The Daily Bogus News” has been read by thousands of people who bought into this newspaper daily. Every person reading this boring newspaper full of lies pays them one cent making them thousands of dollars allowing them to run in the open and tell advertisers about their massive readership eventually securing multi-million advertising deals. What if every one decided to stop buying this newspaper, what will happen then? The newspaper will have zero readership, won’t sell ads and eventually shut down. Today you don’t need to buy anything, a simple like can make someone become the miracle of birth. Here is where your responsibility as a user takes place.

I believe that the job of educators is to explain clicking power to everyone because even though technology has eased our lives, so has the way for us as users to show our amusement to the content being displayed. Did you ever think as a user that with the one click we can all unlike influencers with millions of fans (I’m not saying we should) but don’t you think this power is very important & almost sacred in our world of “digitalization”? With one like, a bad idea floats and stays, a product that was bound to fail, one that shouldn’t have seen the light exists thanks to bogus campaigns and people randomly liking the content being offered. Political campaigns prevail, wrong unethical content surfaces and uneducated sugar coaters get a stage to sell whatever they want, and yet we still continue to like like like and LIKE.

Fortune has become easily accessible thanks to the multitude of audience and the judges (consumers) having weak addicted thumbs always ready to like. My young cousins, members of Generation Alpha (formally known as Gen Z), want to play video games and post their gaming scores to become influencers and play more games, or so they say. My reaction full of sarcasm: “Wow. What a dream and a beautiful goal to be passionate about.” That was till I discovered that this has become a billion dollar industry of gamers posting videos of themselves “slaying it” (aka winning big time). I failed to see how this at any level is amusing and has become this big. What kind of addiction runs this deep? Better yet who the hell is encouraging this and liking this? Of course, only gamers who like these courageous “console heros” (as I call them) who are hopping to get reciprocated likes.

Millennials, previous generations have given us global climate change, wars, unsolved cancer, unsolved aids, unsolved epidemics, rise of poverty & more corporate slavery, and finally they gave us technology without properly teaching us how to limit the use or what is to be of the generations to come as it progresses. It is our time to rise for the task and stop this madness in the name of technology. I knew that it was time to say its enough when I heard of Virtual Reality stores from the comfort of our houses. I think we don’t need any more comfort and we shouldn’t encourage such products to exist. Obesity & other chronic diseases have occupied the bodies of youngsters whom find laziness as the way to go. As an active user for example, I won’t be liking a simple post on virtual stores. Why because I am exercising my opinion power as I truly believe it is time to utilize our technology research on real problems rather than on products that have had much less impact on the true quality of our lives in the last 10 years.

That is why I urge Millennial users to look further than what the SEO (search engine optimization) on google wants to show, much further than SEM (search engine marketing) and paid ads, and even a little bit further than what influencers have to say. Look for those products that are of high quality that are trying to make it, look for the underdogs, don’t stick with mainstream. Don’t be afraid to unlike influencers that don’t bring anything new to the table. Pick content the way you pick high end food. Look for something that will add to humanity, and definitely stop picking content based on sexualized figure shapes of humans.

Photo by Marc Schaefer