An online rumor started that it was secretly a hate group symbol, after a fake Anti-Defamation League poster circulated through social media claiming Care had been coopted by white nationalist groups. For instance, and in true internet form, Care quickly became a meme as users replaced the heart with cultural objects from cartoon characters to celebrities to automatic weapons. The creativity and friction of this process comes starkly into view when the somber space of memorialization encounters the performative and often playful spaces of Facebook. At the same time, this empathetic emoji exemplifies how attempts to cultivate embodied forms of care come with limitations as well as negotiations over conventions of use. The introduction of the Care reaction and its adoption by Facebook users speaks to how the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted innovations-often by virtue of necessity-in expressing emotion, touch, and human connection within digital spaces. We were grappling with a similar problem: How do individuals and communities provide support, closeness, and love (in a word, care) during times of grief, especially when we cannot physically gather for rituals of remembrance and memorialization? How are these practices translated, adapted, or recreated in digital spaces like Facebook, whether in a funeral livestream or a memorial page? From meme to memorial
Smiling face for facebook Offline#
And very quickly, this seventh reaction became more urgent.” Although seemingly an inconsequential Facebook update, the Care reaction is part of a broader story about the need for and cultivation of embodied care across online and offline worlds.Īround the time that Care was introduced, we were in the beginning stages of a National Science Foundation Rapid Response Research project out of George Washington University, Rituals in the Making, investigating sudden changes in funerary and memorialization practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. It looks like jazz hands, or being excited, or two gummi bears squished together. Something beyond Love.” The design team figured a hug would be the best way to convey this, but the attempts at a hug emoji were always “a spectacular failure. In the company blog post, “ Can I Get a Hug? The Story of Facebook’s Care Reaction,” product manager Misbah Uraizee explains that, even before the pandemic, they thought, “Love already works really well,” but needed to “find a reaction that can work for use cases where it’s not purely about love, like when someone wants to show an emotion like sympathy, support, or care. Facebook tech communications manager Alexandru Voica first tweeted out the image alongside a purple pulsating heart (to be unveiled on Facebook Messenger) as “a way for people to share their support for one another during this unprecedented time.” Whether Care stemmed from the embattled company’s altruism or opportunism, the very act of hugging during the pandemic-so hard to conceptualize in the digital and so necessary in the physical-was the thing people needed and yet were unable to do.įacebook had been planning a seventh reaction for a few years, following the success of the 2015 suite. Now, in the face of rising pandemic numbers, Facebook was-perhaps belatedly-giving users the option to express empathy. This was the first new reaction since 2015, when Like was joined by Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. In April 2020, Facebook introduced a new “Care” reaction to its platform in the form of a smile emoji hugging a heart.
But what does it mean to care in a digital space and in a time of mourning? Last year, Facebook launched a new Care reaction amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
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