Save the Fav, Twitter’s Digital Body Language

Faving a recent tweet from the writer.Credit

There’s a kerfuffle at the moment on Twitter about what should happen when you fav something.

Until recently, when you pressed the “favorite” button on a tweet — that is, the little star below a Twitter posting — almost nothing happened. Other users, including the one who originally posted, might see that you’d starred the tweet, but Twitter’s “favorite” was different from the “like” button on Facebook. It wasn’t taken to mean that you actually liked or were interested in the substance of that tweet.

This made the fav one of the few forms of online speech that were mostly disconnected from consequence. When it wasn’t being used as a bookmark to help you remember links for later, pressing “favorite” on a tweet was the digital equivalent of a nod, a gesture that is hard to decipher. The fav derived its power from this deliberate ambiguity.

But now Twitter is slightly altering what happens when you press “favorite.” In what may or may not be a short-term experiment, the service is beginning to use faves as signals in deciding how to arrange users’ timelines. Under its new policy, if Twitter notices that a lot of your friends have faved a tweet, it may show you that tweet, even if you don’t follow the person who posted it.

The new plan won’t change Twitter very much for most users. Yet there is something to celebrate about the fav as it’s used today on Twitter and to mourn its potential transformation into something more Facebook-like. Even if you don’t care about Twitter, the fav is a model for something we need more of in more places online: It is nonspecific, flexible communication — a kind of body language for the web.

One of the problems of communicating online is that words are too precise. It’s especially difficult to express much nuance when you’re trying to be brief.

People encountered this problem immediately after they began communicating online, and they quickly came up with ways around it. For instance, emoticons. If you email your boss to apologize for coming in late to work and she responds, “You’re fired,” it means something very different from “You’re fired :)” or “You’re fired ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.” As technology improved, we began using higher-fidelity variations on emoticons, like emoji, image macros, animated GIFs and, with apps like Snapchat, even pictures of our own facial expressions.

All of these additions to online conversation are helpful. But the Twitter fav is something else altogether. Like an emoticon or a GIF, it can soften or intensify a thought, and even do it simultaneously. The fav, unlike the emoticon, is powerful because it can mean different things to different people at different times, or even at the same time.

The best example of this is what I call the conversation-ending fav. Say you and I are engaged in a long exchange about something, and eventually the conversation peters out. In some online venues, like instant messaging, you might worry that it would be too rude just to stop chatting.

On Twitter, faving a tweet politely communicates that you saw the message. If you say nothing else, it is a polite, one-button way to end the conversation without actually saying you want to end the conversation. If email or instant messaging had faves, we would be saved a lot of unnecessary messages saying, “Got it!” or “Hah, good one.”

But more than just a tepid goodbye, the fav allows each side to come away with different impressions of how the conversation went. I could hit “favorite” to signal “I’m bored. I want to stop talking to you.” But you could read my fav to mean “That was fun, but I gotta go!” In the end everyone wins, because we all read faves in the most self-flattering light.

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.