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In November, we had the pleasure of welcoming alumnus Bob Goodson (EAS99) back to UEA campus for the annual Lasdun Lecture – his first time speaking here since graduating 23 years ago. Entrepreneur and co-author of Like: The Button That Changed The World, Bob took to the stage with a mix of insight, humour, and nostalgia that made the evening feel as much like a reunion as a lecture.
The lecture theatre at The Enterprise Centre witnessed a full house – students, staff, family and friends, all gathered to hear him reflect on the tiny digital feature that ended up shaping how millions of us communicate today.
Bob began with a simple prompt:
Take out your phone. Hold it. Look at it. Maybe check a notification.
Then he explained the point: “Are you using the device, or is the device using you?”
The message landed gently, but powerfully, setting the tone for an evening of reflection on our relationship with technology.
Four Lenses
Bob walked the audience through what he called “the best bits” from his book. Four ideas that help explain how the Like button became such a fixture in our lives:
Innovation is evolutionary, not sudden
Pre-digital behaviour shapes digital design, more than we realise
Every click sits inside a wider attention economy
Biology influences our tech habits, often subconsciously
Invented in a day, remembered for decades
One of the night’s surprising revelations came from Bob’s interviews with the teams who independently developed early versions of the Like button across different platforms. Despite working separately, they all said the same thing:
They built it in a single day – and never imagined it would become iconic.
At the time, it was all about, as Bob put it, “solving a specific problem for a specific site”.
A theme running through Bob’s talk was the simple truth that our technology is built on very old human instincts. “Before any of this”, he said, gesturing at his slides, “we learned by watching each other. We are wired to observe, copy, respond, and build on what we see.”
This led to one of his most interesting insights of the night: that liking something online is itself a form of content creation. To show where it all began, Bob displayed a photo of the very first rough sketch he drew of a thumbs-up, a simple doodle that would eventually evolve into one of the most recognisable icons on the internet.
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Bob also highlighted how internet participation has flipped since the early 2000s, from just 5% of users creating content to 95% actively contributing – a shift the early Like button experiments helped spark.
Humour, nostalgia and personal reflections
Be it producing a classic pointing stick to gesture at his slide deck, a delightfully old-school prop in a talk about digital innovation or sharing light-hearted stories from his student days on campus, his wit kept the audience engaged throughout. The evening also carried moments of heartfelt reflection as Bob acknowledged the mentors and supporters who shaped his journey. He paid tribute to Prof Peter Womack, his first academic advisor at UEA who recently passed away and warmly acknowledged the advisor’s widow in the audience. In doing so, he reminded everyone of the lasting importance of higher education and of the people we meet along the way who change the course of our lives.
Closing insight
After answering questions about app development, the future of social platforms, the importance of regulation and building meaningful technology, he reminded the audience:
The best way to create something meaningful is to pay attention to how people behave; the small, everyday actions that reveal what really matters.
Earlier this year, we spoke with Bob Goodson about his work on the Like button and his journey since graduating from UEA.