City Lights: We opine with abandon

Sometimes it takes a huge event to make you notice a small one. Earlier this month, after the horrific assault on free speech in Paris, I found myself browsing Facebook and realized the ease with which we voice our constitutionally sanctioned opinions.

What made me take note wasn’t any op-ed piece in the Huffington Post or even the comments under it — it was the constant spate of “likes” that accompanied one post after another, as tiny and persistent as a stutter or facial tic.

A Slate article headlined “Charlie Hebdo Suspects Reportedly Rob Gas Station North of Paris” had amassed 110 “likes.” A release from the St. Petersburg Police Department in Florida, detailing a case in which a father was charged with murdering his young daughter, had 269 approving clicks. Articles such as “Santa Ana bakery closed after Three Kings Day bread sickens more than 30 in Orange County” had their own mini-legions of admirers.

Now, before I get a lecture in semantics, let me stress that I know that “like” has multiple shades of meaning. To put it simply, we can’t dislike, at least not in the same way. As opposed to, say, People.com, which gives users a list of options for responding to a story — “Wow,” “LOL,” a heart, a sad face and an angry face — Facebook requires us to like, comment or forever hold our peace.

In that case, a click of the “like” button has a pliable meaning, just as a word like “pretty” can change based on context and tone. If we call something “pretty good,” we mean it’s OK, passable, less than great; if we call it “pretty remarkable,” then it really astounds us. In the same vein, a Facebook thumbs-up may signify approval for a post’s content, sympathy for the people described in the story, friendship with the person who posted the link or even something unrelated. (How many of us have “liked” a post by someone we’re expecting something from, just to calmly remind them that we’re still around?)

So, yes, all those “likes” make sense logically. Aesthetically, though, there’s still something obtuse about a post declaring the death of someone’s mother in a plane crash accompanied by the phrase, “10 people like this.” After a while, all that blanket positivity starts to evoke an Oscar-nominated song from “The Lego Movie” — a bland notion that, in some way, shape or form, everything is awesome.

And Facebook has gotten the message, for sure. In a speech last month, Mark Zuckerberg noted that people have often asked him if the site will include an opposite to “like,” and he replied that the answer, at least specifically, was no.

“Some people have asked for a dislike button because they want to say, ‘That thing isn’t good,’” Zuckerberg said in a video available online. “And that’s not something that we think is good for the world. So we’re not going to build that.”

He added, though, that his team had considered other alternatives to a simple thumbs-up: “One of the things that we’ve had some dialogue about internally and have thought about for quite a while is, what’s the right way to make it so people can easily express a broader range of emotions — to empathize or to express surprise or laughter or any of these things? You know, you can always just comment. Right? So it’s not like there isn’t a way to do that today.”

Very true. Two weeks ago, then, I set a guideline for myself: I would not “like” anything on Facebook unless I could also post a comment or send a message of no fewer than 50 words explaining what it was I liked. I even put an announcement on my own page and proclaimed it “The ‘Like’ Project.” Within a short time, nine people had “liked” my post, perhaps facetiously.

In the days to come, I carefully considered my “likes” and accompanied them with comments, and I had a few memorable exchanges. With a film historian, I talked about my pre-teen memories of watching the 1955 classic “Rebel Without a Cause” and tried to determine how many members of its cast and crew were still alive. I sent warm words to a poet who posted an announcement about her latest book, and she told me about her plans to teach an upcoming workshop.

Granted, these are the kinds of encounters that we have constantly on social media, so my discipline didn’t bring any huge revelations from others.

But I did realize something: When I challenged myself to explain my approvals, they became much more discriminating. To put a twist on an old adage, my talk became less cheap. If I had nothing of value to say about a rock musician’s obituary or an article on Joni Ernst, I simply kept quiet and didn’t try to substitute a “like” for an enlightened position.

That, in fact, has been the center of a debate in recent weeks over the slogan “Je suis Charlie.” Does the phrase signify love for freedom of speech or personal agreement with the magazine’s inflammatory cartoons?

If I am Charlie, how, exactly? Even in its native French, the slogan has two possible meanings: An article in the Washington Post noted that it can translate to either “I am Charlie” or “I follow Charlie,” not quite the same thing, even in context.

But per the First Amendment, we can post “Je suis Charlie” with whatever implications we prefer and not suffer harassment for it. Then, when a friend posts the same thing on Facebook, we can log on and like it. That’s one of the facets of free speech that we always overlook. We get to say what we want, even when we only partly understand what we’re saying.

MICHAEL MILLER is the features editor for Times Community News in Orange County. He can be reached at [email protected] or (714) 966-4617.