Zuckerburg in Verbland
Nowadays Facebook has become an essential item of life. It is like
air and food for many people what they cannot survive without. I do not
intend to discuss about Facebook’s social impact but I have an opinion
on its language policy.
Mark Zuckerburg, the young genius who invented Facebook declared that
Facebook was “helping to define a brand-new language for how people
connect.” “When we started,” Zuckerberg explained, “the vocabulary was
really limited. You could only express a small number of things, like
who you were friends with. Then last year, we added nouns, so you could
like anything that you want “This year, we’re adding verbs. We’re going
to make it so you can connect to anything in any way you want.” It was
all part of “building this language for how people connect,” he said.
There was something charming about the jittery young fellow
announcing his conquest of the verb, as if this part of speech was a
newly discovered territory and we were all hearing the report of the
explorer’s intrepid expedition — Zuck’s Adventures in Verbland. Anyway,
verbs arrived late in our linguistic evolution, built on bedrock of
nouns.
 By adding verbs to the “brand-new language” of social connectivity,
Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook was going to “make it so people can
express an order of magnitude more things than they could before.” In
his presentation, he used that word, “express,” over and over again. But
on closer inspection, the new verb-driven language of Facebook is a
weirdly limited vehicle for human expression.
Complaints about Facebook’s deleterious effect on language are
long-standing, of course. In the past, the main gripes have been about
how the site has sapped the meaning of the words “friend” and “like.” A
“friend” has been reduced to any acquaintance you choose to add to your
Facebook network — someone you “friend” (look, a noun becoming a verb!).
Meanwhile, “liking” something has become equated with the manual click
of a little thumbs-up icon. Crucially, either of these online
interactions can be reversed, by “unfriending” and “unliking.” No
long-term commitment is necessary in this realm of ever-shifting
allegiances. The call goes out, whatever happened to authentic
friendship?
Traditionalists may sound the alarm about new meanings of old words
because of anxieties about the way they think that society is changing,
and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter can serve as easy
targets for those who think that our shared language is going to hell in
a hand basket. Those traditionalists distrust all the ways that social
media can enrich the language, in terms of new vocabulary, new modes of
expression, and new pathways for innovations to spread.
But the latest makeover of Facebook goes far beyond adding special
connotations to particular words. Instead, language is being recast in a
more profound way, turned into a utilitarian tool for “expressing”
relationships to objects in the world in a remarkably inexpressive
fashion. Verbs are for doing things, things that are then announced in
uncomplicated declarations. Sentences become mere instruments for
sharing easy-to-digest morsels of personal information.
Facebook is saying good-bye to the old days when people simply
“liked” things, moving to a much wider verb-space to promote different
activities. You’ll now be able to announce to the world that you are
“watching” (a television show), “listening” (to music), “eating” (a
meal), and so forth.
And as the verbs shift from present tense to past, all of these
activities can then be stitched together with your status updates and
photos to create a reverse-chronological autobiography of sorts in your
Timeline. The Timeline, Zuckerberg submits, is nothing less than The
Story of Your Life.
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