These days our social engagements have been consolidated down to the Like Button. It’s the Internet equivalent of sitting in the middle of a conversation, and all you can say is “cool.” More and more, marketers want to engage their consumers socially by giving us more ways to “like” something. Anything. Even pipe cleaners.

And then we’re barraged with the blinding flash of awesome graphics and proceed to start asking ourselves: are pipe cleaners cool? Do I want my friends and colleagues to know that I have an unhealthy relationship with pipe cleaners? Maybe pipe cleaners are cool now. I mean, they were cool enough to eat with glue in kindergarten. I want to be cool. Like!

And so begins our vicious love affair with the Like Button.

A friend once said: it’s easy to like something. To “love” or “hate” is a strong feeling, while you can like just about anything.

Has the Internet turned us into passive-aggressive beings that are too lazy to contribute to a conversation? Then maybe the “conversations” aren’t good enough to begin with. Maybe we need to talk about real things like where the economy is going, instead of pipe cleaners. Maybe we can talk about how pipe cleaners affect the GNP and childhood dreams of glue.

It’s so easy to dismiss products. I have a speculation that the Like Button may play a part in diluting the human experience. I much prefer the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down method of polling a product’s value (bear in mind that a political or cultural movement is also a product when evaluated for consumption). I was sitting in YouTube’s San Bruno office last year, and we somehow started talking about the user engagement of the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down buttons. The general consensus was that users will usually Thumb Up videos they really like, and Thumb Down videos they really hate. If they’re on the fence, nothing gets clicked. Now this is a direct affront to the concept of the Like Button. Whether or not which one is better for market sales is not the point I’m trying to make. The point is, do you really want a lot of lukewarm likers, or do you want a concentrated group that you know love your product?

It’s the same idea as collecting Twitter followers. Some people have 50 followers, some 500, some 5,000, and if you’re the local celebrity blogger, 5 million. But how many of these followers actually care about what you have to say, and how many are just trying to get you to click on porn?