By Louis Doulas
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1.

Screenshot of Pleaselike.com taken October 27th 2011

Pleaselike.com is a browser-based artwork by Rafaël Rozendaal made in 2010.  The website consists of an entirely white page with an embedded Facebook classic-blue thumbs up ‘Like’ button positioned in the center.  To the button’s right is an ongoing tally of people who have clicked the button. As of this minute—October 27^th,2011 at 9:55 PM—18,085 people[1] have liked the website.  I have yet to participate by clicking ‘like’, a fact Facebook has made quite apparent by urging me on with the following sentence:

Be the first of your friends. 

The website first presents the user with an encouragement to submit to a seemingly interstitial request.  Nothing appears to be at stake in the user’s relationship to this request; either she clicks or she doesn’t click.  The consequences bear no apparent reward or punishment—in fact, there is a marked absence of both.  The confrontation quickly becoming slightly idiotic when prompted with the thought of not clicking.  So the user—ideally, without such prolonged apprehension—clicks and accepts, enlisting in Rozendaal’s playful game.  However, the relationship concludes at this point.  The user clicks ‘Like’, perhaps proceeds to check her Facebook profile to witness the immediate result of her action, then proceeds onto the next website in her surfing queue.

Suppose, though, that the user doesn’t click. What happens then? First, why wouldn’t someone click ‘Like’? One reason may point to the user being of the ‘private’ type, not wanting the results of her click to show up on her Facebook profile. However, anyone can hide stories like this from their profile by configuring a simple setting in their privacy settings (or alternatively the ‘Hide this Action from Profile’ option).  Pleaselike.com would still receive the user’s ‘like’, but none of her Facebook friends would see her activity.  Another reason may point to the user’s unwillingness to forgo privacy, though again this tactic is thwarted: even if the user abstains from clicking, her information will still be accounted for and collected by Facebook for merely just visiting the page[2].  Why else, then, wouldn’t someone want to click and make Rozendaal’s work ‘complete’?

1. They aren’t familiar with the site and never actually cross paths with it.
2. They simply put, just don’t care, moving on without further dispute.
3. They express disdain for the artist by refusing to ‘participate’.
4. They wonder what it means not to click.

The point here is that no one will not not-like the website and this may very well be the point of this Rozendaal work.  The user confronts the webpage with really an absence of choice, that is, the Like’s button absence of relationship to content outside of itself has already created the user’s decision for her.  Without a clear accompaniment of content (an article, an image, a video, etc.) for what the Like button is existing to support, the user has really nothing to do but to follow the authority of the website and click because of the void of other options.  The lack of harm in doing so and because of the briefly satisfying—if not mediocre—moment it offers (the chance to be a ‘part’ of an artwork, to join your peers and not feel left out, etc.) only solidifies the motivation to click.  The user here then ‘likes’ to fulfill the site’s only existence, bridging the gap of intention the artist has built.  The user clicks, not to confirm and share her taste for a specific brand, aesthetic or event, but to ‘like’ both the website and to confirm the action of liking itself; a recognition of a recognition.  The title, Pleaselike, suggests a modest tone and creates in the user an equally modest response:  “It’s no problem, really, I can click”.  Pleaselike, with no comma separating the two words is a command devoid of a command, an implication that the user do something on the page; and what is there to do but to click the only clickable thing?

Pointing to nothing but itself, the website composes an accumulation of numbers, representations of other users who also did as the user did.  There are no direct repercussions or ramifications, there is no disdain or disapproving face and no celebratory one; liking here is a seemingly empty meta-gesture. And thus Rozendaal’s critique appears to reveal itself: through the absence of any detrimental circumstances, the Like button is but a compliant form of support, producing affirmation from users and peers without requesting further textual articulation or clarification.

Just as Rozendaal’s title, Pleaselike blankly justifies its clickable implications by asking nicely, so too does the Like button and Tumblr Note carry seemingly modest and quiet but highly anticipatory requests.

2.

The Facebook Like button is a politely constructed symbol, simultaneously begging to be clicked and not to be clicked.  With no perceivable authority implied in its design and function, it never actually forces the user to engage with it. It is clicked because the user does so on her own symbolic behalf.  However, the Like button must proceed onwards under such passive-neutral pretenses, for its reliance on the user is an important determinant in the advancement of its own business model.  The Like button must exert a non-threatening interface so its users can comfortably continue to activate and integrate it into their online routine.

Besides providing a limited amount of insight to the button’s embedder, its ongoing application outside of the Facebook website, embedded into websites and blogs across all disciplines acting as basic promotional tools and neat suggestions for ‘support’ marks the convenient constructions of a self-referential Web 2.0 business strategy consisting of the employment of walled gardens[3] and financial sustainability through willingly provided user voluntarism. The walled gardens of Facebook—along with paralleling social networking sites striving for similar types of web dominance—entail that user activity is consolidated and performed through one centralized service ultimately suggesting a scarcity of ‘freely’ provided user information to those other websites and companies outside of the monopolized domain of one single, concentrated website [collecting, housing and eventually selling immense amounts of data over a supposedly fixed period of time].  These motives especially highlight themselves through the perpetual use of the Facebook Like button and of seemingly non-existant equivalents i.e. the continuation to Like using the Facebook Like button because there are no other options.  Or under similar logic, to paint a more vivid and encompassing picture (but in response to the often disregard of the expensive, fetishized computer hardware allowing for seemingly ‘free’, ‘immaterial’ social interactions and content consumption), Gene McHugh points out,

“Go on, keep chatting with your friends, watching videos, listening to music—it’s all fluid and immaterial now and that’s great—just so long as you do so through the iPad.”[4]

Though the Like button can exist off of Facebook, it never actually quite does as all action and information channels itself back into the social network.

What is of primary concern here is not the Like button’s use within the lounge environment of Facebook (liking friend’s images, statuses’, etc.) or the mining of user data for profit, but its application and accompaniment onto websites, images, articles, etc. (that today approximately 905,000 websites employ)[5] which often require and warrant an expanded critical consideration of content from its users, rather than a summarized one.  The Like button as is does its job by acting as a visual log of peer endorsement.  But what is the value in these confirmations other than providing the button’s embedder with a temporary relief from a project’s potential failure, from a user’s online alienation, from friendlessness? As well as existing as mere stepping stones in a user’s ongoing performance in self-branding? Maybe the Like button is not worthy of critique or contemplation because its utility is so specific, obvious, non-threatening and narrowly-bound.  However, a hidden, subtle conflict emerges in such evaluative scenarios that is worth noting, one that surely many users have experienced: an emptiness, a going-nowhere skewed resolve of content, of appreciation, and of understanding.  (more…)