Refusing to participate in social conventions today could help you save face in the future

By Devyn Lewis
Photos by Ben Buckley

So here’s the thing: I’m not on Facebook.

Call me anti-social, call me crazy, or call me eccentric, but I have to say that Facebook really creeps me out.
Okay, so I used to be on Facebook, I’ll admit it, but since then I have sobered up to my own beliefs, realizing that Facebooking just really isn’t my style. Why the big deal about Facebook, you ask?

Maybe it’s because I am a private person and I just don’t wish to disclose any part of myself to hundreds of Facebook friends (okay, so I never had that many “friends”). Or perhaps I just don’t want all my personal information to be archived in a gigantic Facebook database (that’s for the government to do). And maybe I just feel really irked by the fact that in June, Facebook acquired an Israeli company called face.com, a program that would enable face recognition technology on their website.

So if you haven’t already guessed, in addition to being labelled eccentric, I have also been labelled a conspiracy theorist. However, the sources for surveillance technology often comes from mainstream media, such as the story about face.com, which was published in June of 2012, in The New York Times. But what we really need to ask ourselves is this: what does the biggest social media company in the world want with a facial recognition surveillance technology, if not to further encrypt the already intricately organized data from their website?
Now, this is the part where my critical political science eye comes in. Surveillance tools have always been a part of totalitarian societies, and are paramount to its function and cohesiveness for control. A watched population is an obedient population (and are well-behaved, even if they only think they are being watched), and governments of totalitarian regimes have always implemented these controls in order to subdue a potential unruly population. In today’s modern western societies, surveillance measures that give the government more power are left over elements from those long dead regimes. However, with the advanced technology that we have today, surveillance has become much easier, and not only that, but with digital computerized networks, the populace now post and collect data on themselves.

Now, I’m not saying that Zuckerberg, or any of the other shareholders to Facebook, are an icon of big brother or anything. In fact, if there is a big brother, he has become faceless and drowned in the infinite bits of data that ceaselessly flow through the internet stream. The reality is, that as opposed to the old totalitarian regimes, the amount of data that is available today is physically impossible for any single person to watch over, or even a single government bureaucracy to handle. But the information is continuously being massively digitally organized, and is still there if anybody wants to use it.

So call it paranoia, or whatever you want, I still think it’s the most rational thing that I have ever done. In the meantime, I will continue to be as faceless as possible.