Assessing the cognitive and communicative properties of Facebook Reactions and Likes as lightweight feedback cues

The emergence of Facebook Reactions provides new opportunities to explore the nature of paralinguistic digital affordances (PDAs; lightweight one-click social media response cues). Guided by adaptive structuration theory and the concept of cognitive automaticity, a survey of 255 individuals aged 18–24 assessed the cognitive processes and communicative meanings associated with the provision of Facebook Reactions and Likes. Although Like and...