Currency of Opinion
Today is the first time I tried to load some music on Facebook, only to find that the content was locked until I clicked the 'like' button on the Facebook page.
Thinking about it, I realised that this is becoming more and more common; videos that won't play until you like them, or that trigger and automatic 'like' status when you play them, thus gluing them to your profile. This just happened to be the first time I personally felt pressured into 'liking' something.
I didn't click the 'like' button for a fairly simple reason; how am I supposed to know if I like something if I haven't heard it yet? Locking the music until I press 'like'; isn't that sort of defeating the point? I can't have an opinion on something I can't listen to, and the term 'like' most definitely infers an opinion.
When did the Facebook 'like' status become some sort of currency? It's like when 14-year-olds used to their MySpace friends lists as a digital popularity contest, except now on a bigger, corporate scale.
Now businesses have been courting consumer opinion since business first became a thing. But previously they've always courted opinion in order to extract currency from their consumers. If people 'liked' a particular company, then they'd spend their money on products made by that company. Simple.
But now companies seem to be courting consumer opinion for the sake of the opinion itself. They're offering actual content to consumers in return for the assurance that the consumer 'likes' their brand. They don't make any money from this; they're treating Facebook 'likes' like they used to treat pounds and dollars.
Maybe this is the future of marketing. Maybe businesses can secure profit from investors by proving that a huge number of people 'like' their brand and are therefore likely to put down actual money for their products. And the consumer gets some free content in return; all they have to do is click a 'like' button.
The result is the result is that the 'liker' becomes an effort-free advertising affiliate for the company; their friends can now see that they 'like' a particular brand, and are therefore more likely to 'like' the brand themselves, securing a higher potential consumer base for that brand and a greater possible chance of investment for the producer of that brand.
This could be great; it could lead to real peer-assessed marketing, taking a cross cut of the whole of society. However, judging by the fact that the whole of society seems to transform into a collective moron when allowed access to the internet, it could be terrible.
We'll just have to wait and see. But regardless of the outcome, I'm not ever going to claim that I like something, even when it's online, when I don't know what it is, and can't find out what it is until after I claim that I 'like' it. That's just stupid.
