Social media has come a long way. On Wednesday, Facebook released their animated ‘reaction’ emojis allowing people to interact with content, instead of just liking the post. It brings a whole new layer to social media, especially on the Texas Tech Campus.
“I think it’s changing how we’re communicating,” says Allison Matherly, Coordinator of Digital Engagement for Texas Tech. “It gives me a lot more insight into how people are interacting with the content and what their feelings are, much more than a ‘like’ does.”
This is something that Matherly says has been a long time coming.
“A lot of audiences have been asking for this ‘dislike’ button for so long and this is kind of their answer to that in a way that they feel makes more sense than just saying ‘dislike,’ so I think people across all ages will really start to use it as they are noticing it’s there,” she says.
Matherly manages the University’s social media accounts including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The various reaction emojis allow her insight into how students are interacting with the content she posts.
“It’s going to provide a lot more information to us and we’re hoping that we can take that information and continue to try to make Texas Tech as great of a place as we can. These reactions are going to give us that little bit more insight than we have had in the past and we can really try to work with that and make changes.” Matherly says.
We brought the subject to the students and asked what they thought about this new Facebook function.
“It’s interesting! I like that I can be like ‘oh no I don’t like this’ so I’m ‘angry’ towards it instead of having a dislike button. It’s more interesting and more intricate,” says David Chambless, a Tech Senior.
“I think it’s kind of cool, but I think most people wanted the dislike button versus just showing your emotion. I have yet to use it and I can’t say I probably will, but I think it’s a cool feature,” says Alexis Canchola, a Tech Junior.
Matherly says she thinks that with the addition of these different emotion emojis, it may completely change social media mentality and limit how much people actually take the time to use words and say phrases like ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Congrats’ on posts. Instead, they will just press one of the reaction emojis to express their feelings.
“I think people are going to need to decide for themselves how they want to use them, like much of the same way that we have already with the ‘like” button,” Matherly says. “I think it’s changing how we’re communicating in that we can use these little icons to try to express emotion in a digital way where we don’t necessarily have tone with our digital communication. Anybody who’s received a sarcastic text message and hasn’t been sure that it was sarcasm knows exactly what I’m talking about, so we now have these icons to make sure that our correct tone is getting across,” she adds.
Matherly says she hasn’t heard about many student using these new Facebook emojis yet, but she thinks it will only be a matter of time before everyone gets used to it.