We were out to dinner at a casual spot last night–one of those places that seems to have TV screens covering every inch of wall space. As we sat down and I looked around, I was struck by how many of those screens featured close-ups of talking heads at that moment.
If your TV is tuned to a news show, or any kind of sports talk show, you’re bound to see a lot of faces on a screen. And now, with so much of daily communication happening through video calls on your computer, you get the same point-blank exposure to human faces on screens at work, too.
This didn’t used to be the case. Once, news shows or sports shows would feature footage of actual news events or highlights of key plays from a big game, with an occasional shot of an anchorman or a reporter on the scene. As some point in the past, however, somebody decided that actual film of events wasn’t really needed–probably for cost reasons–and head shots of people arguing with each other about the event would suffice instead. Add the onset of video calls into the mix, and the result is that we now get a steady diet of head shots, like the big screen footage of Big Brother in the Apple 1984 ad.
Babies are known to be naturally attracted to human faces, and studies have found that adult brains tend to look for human facial characteristics in various objects, like the fronts of cars. If in fact we’re hard-wired to appreciate human faces, this must be a golden age for homo sapiens, because I think it’s safe to say that this generation is seeing more close-ups of other human faces than any other generation in history.
Webner House 