Faces

I started using the Internet during the high school. In the beginning, every email address in my address book belonged to someone I knew personally. I could easily picture people behind the strings of letters. But this state of the affairs didn’t last long.

Soon I started venturing outside of the friendly walls of my school. In the beginning, I was digging through resources published by the local university (where much later I would end up studying). There it was still possible to find the professors who published things online and by that fact keep everything online humane, attached to real people.

But when I ended up outside of those two friendly institutions there was no way (at least back then) to find out how those people looked. It had left me with a certain feeling that something was missing. I couldn’t connect various email addresses and nicknames with faces. And because of that, the internet lost its humanness.

Even now, when more and more people have photos of them published online it can take some digging through to find how such and such looks like. To connect a human face to a blog post or a comment. It’s not that I really care how people look, just that I want to have the connection to something humane, something real. My brain is trying to use the faculties evolved for millennia to understand the world.

That’s why the first thing I go when stumbling on a new blog is about me section. I hope to find there a face which I can connect with the author. It’s also why I crave the photos of any team I’m interacting with.

A photo is a small substitute for meeting in person.