Does ‘liking’ everything mean you’re old?
Celebrities like Iker Casillas have become meme fodder over supposed overuse of a 15-year-old internet feature
There was a moment in which the like first became the atom of social approval — and it wasn’t all that long ago. The like didn’t appear as a feature on the first massive social network, Facebook, until 2009. On YouTube, it showed up in 2010. Instagram, which was born that year, had us liking things from day one, becoming the app that elevated the practice to the highest ranks of social more. Such was the like’s popularity at this point that it began to make the news. In 2019, EL PAÍS ran a headline which, in English, translates to “Selena Gomez has the photo with the most likes ever in the history of Instagram.” Those historic four million little hearts were tapped on an image of the star drinking a soft drink through a straw. Today, that figure is nothing. The current recordholder is Lionel Messi, whose photo holding Argentina’s World Cup trophy in 2022 garnered nearly 75 million likes. Though these mini-statements of approval are free to those who give them out, in the era of late capitalism and self-exploitation, they can amount to a deposit on a new apartment for those on the receiving end, if enough are amassed.
