Really, actually, I just don’t care. The level at which I don’t is below the ultimate level of rest of whale feces.

Why don’t I care?

I was never any more happy with the notion of “favoriting” something with a star than I was with liking something with a thumbs-up. The forced dichotomy of simplification developed within the use of “free” social media platforms is never going to be satisfactory for everyone. There will always be implications for every action (and non-action) in such a system that are both real and assumed. @tressiemcphd has written about this, and a number of other really smart people have also said smart things about how people use and react to these things.

Somewhere in the house I have duffle bag that was issued to me in 1982 at Ft. Jackson, NC on my way to Ft. Benning, GA. On the bottom of it is painted in grey a club (as in that found in within a deck of cards) and dash at the twelve o’clock position. This was so dozens or hundreds of duffle bags stacked together could be readily identified to the units where they belonged. This goes back to World War II and, if you pay attention, you can see it in various Hollywood movies where the 101st Infantry is depicted, such as those about the Battle of the Bulge.

I mention this because it because most of life there have been symbols associated with my life that were not of my choosing. “Tod” is a good example of this. After all, a name is just a symbol constructed with predetermined components. Any icon, simple or complex, is really no different. Whatever values, images, understanding of Tod that exists is based on the collections of my actions not the symbols used to describe those actions. I know that any symbols used have broader contextual meanings and people will apply their own meanings and such, but that will always happen, regardless of symbology, more importantly it will happen regardless of what I think those symbols mean.

In other words, haters gonna hate, hearters gonna heart.

If you are concerned that using the heart is going to cause someone to think that you love someone’s tweet or action, rest assured that anyone who does think that probably thinks they can love a refrigerator and is thus of no consequence.

The heart as an icon has never meant much to me. It has been so overused to the point of “I kind of have a pretense of affection for this thing/person.” Twitter’s use of the heart just drives it into more meaningless to the point that Common Core exams will simply use the heart as a bubble to fill.

Of course, what’s really going on is Twitter wants to make Twitter less hateful. They think by forcing people to use hearts there will be less hate spewed. One really can’t love a hateful tweet…well, unless of course you don’t actually think it is hateful.  And so Twitter is getting hate tweets from users about the heart. I think there is a word for that.