I’ve been thinking about faces lately. I wonder if we aren’t growing tired of looking at them. My thoughts along these lines were ignited by two seemingly unrelated incidents.
During the pandemic, while we were in Mexico, we communicated with family members in Canada via FaceTime. After two years, one of our children announced that it was getting difficult for her to get her kids to come to the phone for a FaceTime session. “What with online schooling and social media,” she said, “they spend so much time looking at screens they’ve gone off them. They’re tired of just looking at faces.” So we switched to emails, texting, and non-visual telephoning, and communication was restored.
The second spur was reading an essay by Barbara Ehrenreich, called “The Humanoid Stain,” in which she notes that in cave art painted by our distant ancestors, some of which are 40,000 years old, there are meticulous depictions of animals, with “almost superhuman attention to facial and muscular detail,” but very few depictions of human beings. When humans are in the paintings, they are simple stick figures “found in the margins of the paintings containing animal shapes.” And, significantly, those humanoid stick figures have no faces.
Ehrenreich connects that curiosity with our more recent obsession with our own faces. By about 2002, she notes, “we had entered the age of ‘selfies,’ in which everyone seemed fascinated by their electronic self-portraits.” We can attest to that: in San Miguel de Allende, the main square (called El Jardín, or the Garden) is dominated by an enormous cathedral, known as La Parroquia, the construction of which was started in 1580 and wasn’t completed until the 1880s. It’s one of the most popular tourist attractions in Mexico. Thousands of visitors marvel at it every week. Most of them take photographs of it, and most of those photographs are selfies, taken with smart phones, with the cathedral lurking somewhere in the background, completely upstaged by the photographers’ foreshortened faces. Clearly, unlike the ancient cave artists, visitors to San Miguel are less interested in recording their surroundings than they are in recording what they looked like when they were in those surroundings.
During the pandemic, however, in-person social interaction was replaced by communication via digital media. The actual was supplanted by the virtual. School classes, family get-togethers, book clubs, board meetings, office parties, all took place on screens. During the three years of the pandemic, we saw a lot of faces. Up close and in detail. No wonder we grew tired of them. Two-dimensional, posed faces were all we saw. And in many cases, the faces we looked at most while on social media platforms like Zoom and FaceTime were our own. Not since Narcissus mooned over his own physiognomy in a pool of water have humans spent so much time staring at images of themselves.
In 2014, neurologists at the University of California conducted a study in which they showed a number of photographs of human faces to a group of sixth-graders who had just spent five days camping where there was no wifi, no cell phones, and no television. The children were asked to identify the emotions depicted in each photograph – faces showing the five basic human emotions (fear, happiness, disgust, anger, and sadness) that Charles Darwin said babies were able to recognize almost at birth. Then they showed the same set of photographs to an equal number of sixth-graders who had spent their normal amount of time (on average, 4.5 hours per day) on computers and social media. The first group, after only five days with no screen time, were about 50-percent better at identifying the emotions the faces in the photographs were displaying. And not only were the campers better at interpreting facial expressions, but the group that had stayed on social media during that time were much less likely to understand the emotions of other people.
According to the study, then, the more time we spend looking at faces on screens, the less likely we are to understand the emotions shown on those faces. We could mistake fear, say, for anger, or sadness for disgust. Think of the social consequences. And after three years of pandemic screen time, with much less actual social interaction to act as a corrective, we may now be less able to understand each other’s emotional states than we were before Covid. In fact, since so much of that screen time was spent looking at our own faces, we could easily now be less able to understand even our own emotions, at least insofar as they are depicted in our facial expressions, let alone each other’s.
We no longer know what other people are feeling. Their faces are closed books to us, like the blank faces of those stick figures in cave paintings. We have developed a kind of social prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize people by their faces, which is the neurological disease that, in Oliver Sack’s famous book, made a man unable to recognize his wife unless she was wearing a particular hat. Maybe we should no longer rely on our facial expressions to communicate our emotions. When we have our mug shot taken, for example, we shouldn’t assume that by putting on a fierce expression people will believe that we are confident about anything. People might even think we’re feeling frightened and sad.
Neolithic cave painters, writes Ehrenreich, “knew where they stood in the scheme of things, which was not very high.” They knew that the art was more important than the artist. They couldn’t have known that their art would be seen and admired 40,000 years after they created it, but they may have known that anyone could learn a valuable lesson by looking at it.
I think it's more likely my drafting skills that make my Neolithic selfie a tad inscrutable. I was trying to put a forced smile on him while he tried to figure out which button to push on his device.
Great post. I don't know if it's relevant, but if I watch a clip of a film with the sound down, the actors' faces become more expressive to me (it's my way of working out whether they can act). Perhaps the interaction between sound and vision in our online talks has something to do with the issue?