Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
What’s in a face?
March 8, 2011
Thesis: our ability to recognize a specific set of faces is as unique an identifier as the image of our own face is, and the implications of giving others access and control of this information gives me the heebie-geebies.
Have you ever been in the shower and heard the phone ring? Did you ever rush out in a towel to answer the call only to find that the phone was never actually ringing? Have you ever been looking up at the clouds and noticed animals scampering about? Maybe in your dullest of dull moments you’ve seen a wallpaper pattern that looked like a face and it made you chuckle. I always notice them on bathroom walls. Maybe you’ve even seen Jesus burned onto your toast or the Virgin Mary in your taco shell. Whatever it is that you may see or hear, if you’ve ever experienced one of these moments you’re familiar with the psychological phenomenon called pareidolia.
When speaking of visual information, which I am primarily discussing here, pareidolia is most commonly associated with facial recognition. For reasons related to not mistaking a lion in the grass for just a pile of sticks, or a child recognizing its mother’s friendly face and not its mortal enemy’s, humans treat visual information that resembles facial patterns as an immediate priority. Portions of our neural substrate go on high alert, and before we have any time to think about it we have a memo about a face that we need to make a decision about, and quick. Is that a lion? Is that my creepy uncle? In fact a study in Neuroreport points out that when differentiating between our ability to recognize faces, face-like objects and other unrelated objects, seeing face-like objects initiated brain activity at rates comparable to seeing actual faces. This contrasts with the slower rate at which brain activity is initiated after seeing unrelated (obviously not face) objects. This activity is handled primarily by a portion of the brain called the fusiform face area and those subscribed to the theory of domain specificity would argue that we come pre-programmed as infants with a seemingly precognitive (i.e. insanely fast and involuntary) ability to cross-reference this visual data with patterns that evolution has deemed to be important for our survival.
Why is this important and what kind of role does this facial recognition ability play in how we define our own identities? Well, I would argue that the saturation of our activities and consolidation of our data online into social networking services make this a very interesting topic and a slightly worrisome one when we consider the proportion of our identity being willingly surrendered to private companies to do with as they please. A recent art initiative called Face To Facebook brings some of these issues to light. As one of the co-authors Paolo Cirio writes on his site:
This project was a social experiment: stealing 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face-recognition software and then posting them on a custom-made dating website, sorted by their facial expression characteristics. Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules. We established a new website (lovely-faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data.
Face To Facebook is what initially started me on this inquiry into the importance of the face in defining identity and I think it brings up a lot of interesting questions. I am slightly conflicted about how I should feel about this project, however. My main concern is that the only major reaction to this piece will be that people will pressure facebook to create added layers of firewall around what they believe to be their personal data. I would think facebook has a similar interest in protecting this data. It’s theirs. We handed it to them through sneaky little user agreements. Intuition leads me to believe facebook doesn’t really care about safeguarding data for its users, but it definitely cares about its strategic and competitive interests. Having a million users floating around with all of their connections and social data on display lowers the demand (albeit microscopically in proportion) for their product. The ironic thing in all this is that my fusiform face area has no way of alerting me to the dangers of facebook as it approaches on the virtual serengeti.
The point I’m beginning to make here is not to demonize social networking services. However, by bringing our faces online and contextualizing them with our data we’ve all participated in an act that simultaneously humanizes and adds greater risk to our identities in the virtual space. Especially since we are given the power to control how they are defined, but not how this definition is used. Consider that you may only meet thousands of people in your lifetime and only friendly enough with a handful of those that would be authorized to touch your face. Online, our face is bruised from the millions of other faces we bump into. It can even be de- and re-contextualized, as the Face to Facebook case illustrates. Why is this problematic? When we’re infants we have very little in the way of identifying features. We can’t speak, we can’t walk, we have questionable levels of memory and no real personal history to refer to. Yet our ability to identify facial patterns shows itself to be fundamental to our existence, and in time the unique set of faces we are able to identify as friend or foe becomes central. As it can be argued that the data surrounding our online activities (e.g. purchases, sites we visit, etc.) is very personal, we can think of the unique set of friends we have on facebook as being a key to our identity – and this no longer belongs to only us. Let’s think about the following exercise, in which I take a collection of my facebook friends’ faces and then ask you to write down the first letter of the first name for each “face” below (or up to the right depending on your browser configuration). Try it out:
What did you come up with? Was it:
TGACAMSCSCDB
?
Maybe. We might have all twelve of these friends in common and you might know them. Chances are we don’t. Chances are even smaller that we share all of the same friends, and if you and I are also friends then my set of friends and your set of friends have become mutually exclusive. But facebook definitely could be successful in this exercise, and so could whomever they choose to sell this information to. My point here is that the ability to identify faces is central to our identity, and our ability to identify all of our friends is very unique to us as individuals – as much as any of our physical attributes. Not only have we surrendered our own face, (one of) our most intimate of physical attributes, we’ve also surrendered a code that we started building as infants and was/is essential to our survival.
And it’s not as if this online identity is superfluous. Remember back in the day before email how nice things were? We didn’t care about our identity being stolen. If this whole internet thing goes to hell in a hand basket we can always just revert back to the way things were and everything will be fine. Our physical world resides independent of our online life, right? Well not really. Surveillance systems in our physical environment, no matter how sophisticated the sensing technology, ultimately rely on cross referencing the gathered information with a database containing an individual’s unique traits. If you’ve never been arrested you usually wouldn’t have any reason to suspect a system to be able to identify you. Unless you’ve willingly given this information ahead of time. What’s more, identities may be triangulated very easily given their connections. I would argue that the manner in which our face is treated in the virtual space will only be replicated in physical space.
Photographs of the self have long been believed to carry great power. Crazy Horse famously forbid his picture from ever being taken, and countless indigenous cultures seemed to have understood the power that this act signified. If you were were being hunted by authorities, or if you felt the encroachment of civilization you wouldn’t so willingly give the outsider the ability to identify you. I would only say that although we seem to have become comfortable with the idea of having our picture taken, I’m not so sure that we’ve really thought about the idea of our ability to recognize faces being taken or replicated.
With all of the ways we may be identified online, casually finding the faces that we are familiar with and then allowing others to own that information has implications greater than most of us have considered. As one of our most essential and innate cognitive processes, facial recognition is an important part of our identity and survival. Continuing this activity online has obviously struck a chord in our lizard brain, as is evidenced by the unprecedented number of individuals engaged in the activity and the significance of this is that we are humanizing our virtual environment and/or dehumanizing our physical environment by surrendering this information and allowing it to be controlled by others. The jury of my mind is still out.