If you’d asked me to do a trends report 20 years ago I doubt it would have said much about the looming importance of the thumbs-up sign. Mobile enabled commerce; maybe, virtual communities for the elderly; certainly, using our massively powerful system of interconnected computing devices to communicate via the medium of a raised pollex; probably not.
The thumbs-up became properly prominent in digital life as the Facebook symbol for liking something, an unambiguous, unsubtle, YES, to a particular bit of internet. Facebook soon made it a gateway to a deeper range of ‘what I think of something’ emojis ranging from love to anger. On its own, the thumbs-up couldn’t do enough, it was too straightforward.
But, as emoji have permeated our textual lives and crept into messaging and email I’ve found huge joy and flexibility in the thumbs-up as a piece of punctuation. It truly extends the language, compressing a ton of useful meaning into a single click or tap. Obviously, sometimes it’s just ‘yes’ or ‘OK’, but very often it does something you can’t easily do with just a few words - it can say, for instance; “I have received your message, I don’t necessarily agree with it, but this conversation is now ended and I’m grateful for your participation’. Mostly, that’s a hard thing to communicate. Now we can do it with a click.
But a place I never expected to see thumbs-ups so regularly is in the we’re-all-in-the-future-now world of video conferencing, in virtual meetings with teams across the world.
Most of us in connected businesses have been there. You’re using Skype or Hangout, you’ve got people dialed in from round the world and most of them have muted themselves because the audio streams just go crazy when there’s drilling in Tokyo and dogs barking in Copenhagen. This demands a sort of performative silence from the muted participants. Like clowns or mimes they have to dial up their body language to keep the energy equivalent to real-world meeting interaction; keeping their heads cocked to engaged angles, occasionally nodding approval with vigorous grins.
So, when the moderator remembers to check in with the team around the world – “hey Tokyo, that make sense to you?” – the simplest thing for the muted watchers to do is stick their thumbs-up. Better that than the weird pause while they fumble for the un-mute button, spilling a coffee on their keyboard and knocking some servers offline.
I love this. I love the ways our physical human reality clings on in even the most mediated technological environments. We’re streaming video at each other across the world and sometimes the best way to meld our minds is to wave our digits at each other. THUMBS-UP EMOJI.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
