Like
The Button That Changed the World
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A riveting, insider's look at the creation and evolution of the like button and what it reveals about innovation, business, and culture—and its profound impact on modern human interaction.
"…an entertaining new book by Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson on the origins of the "like" button." — The Economist
Over 160 billion times a day, someone taps a like button. How could something that came out of nowhere become so ubiquitous—and even so addictive? How did this seemingly ordinary social media icon go from such a small and unassuming invention to something so intuitive and universally understood that it has scaled well beyond its original intent?
This is the story of the like button and how it changed our lives. In Like, bestselling author and renowned strategy expert Martin Reeves and coauthor Bob Goodson—Silicon Valley veteran and one of the originators of the like button—take readers on a quest to uncover the origins of the thumbs-up gesture, how it became an icon on social media, and what's behind its power.
Through insights from key players, including the founders of Yelp, PayPal, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, and FriendFeed, you'll hear firsthand the disorderly, serendipitous process from which the like button was born. It's a story that starts with a simple thumbs-up cartoon but ends up with surprises and new mysteries at every turn, some of them as deep as anthropological history and others as speculative as the AI-charged future.
But this is much more than the origin story of the like button. Drawing on business and innovation theory, evolutionary biology, social psychology, neuroscience, and other human-centered disciplines, this deeply researched book offers smart and unexpected insights into how this little icon changed our world—and all of us in the process.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reeves (The Imagination Machine), chairman of the corporate think tank BCG Henderson Institute, and Goodson, founder of the data analytics company Quid, join forces for a stimulating inquiry into the creation and consequences of the "like" button. They trace the button's unlikely path to digital ubiquity, describing how in the mid-2000s, news aggregator Digg.com's distillation of feedback into "digg" and "bury" options foreshadowed the thumbs up/down binary, and how Mark Zuckerberg refused to introduce a like button to Facebook until 2009 because he worried it would undermine his site's share feature. Exploring the like button's neurological effects, Reeves and Goodson note studies finding that both liking someone else's post and receiving likes on social media boosts dopamine levels, which the authors attribute to the evolutionary impulse to share information and reward others who do the same. The authors don't shy from their subject's darker side, lamenting that it enables data brokers to track and sell information on individuals' preferences, and that it may contribute to political polarization by feeding algorithms that create online echo chambers. An extended exploration of the "thumbs up" symbol from Roman gladiators through Siskel and Ebert feels superfluous, but the assessment of how the button affects internet users is nuanced and thought-provoking. Fans of Taylor Lorenz's Extremely Online will enjoy this.
