“There are all kinds of situations in which this sort of double meaning comes in handy. You don’t really find my joke funny, but you don’t want to hurt my feelings? Fav it; I’ll interpret it as a hearty LOL.
“You want to kiss up to a superior who keeps posting banal New Age quotations? Fav her; you can always plausibly deny any sycophancy to your colleagues, because a fav doesn’t mean anything.
“You may wonder why should we celebrate doublespeak. The body language analogy is useful here. Shrugs, grunts, winks, nods, squints, eyebrow tilts—these are undefined signals, little human gestures that suggest some meaning. They’re powerful because they’re intentional, but also because they’re ambiguous.
“Sometimes body language hides more than it says. But we use our bodies to do some of the talking because maintaining civility and good feelings is often necessary; for the sake of everyone, you don’t say every honest thought that pops into your head.
“Twitter’s fav acquired its power only by happenstance. In its early days, the service never defined what the ‘favorite’ button was for, leaving people free to find creative ways to use it.
“The history of the fav should serve as a model for the many new chat apps popping up: They should resist overdefining every feature or making every action a signal in some kind of learning algorithm. They should add in a few extra user-interface elements that do nothing at all.
“At first, people will wonder what they’re for. In time, they may come to develop a completely new way of connecting.
—Farhad
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