A Picture of a Man- and Maybe More

“That’s your prompt.”

Well, thank you for the helpful explanation.

What do I see? I see a man, dark skinned, broad nose, brown eyes, no hair, bald head shining, with what look to be facial tattoos boldly stamped across his forehead and cheeks. In an odd way, the dark shapes on his cheeks accentuate his bone structure.

He is wearing blue scrubs, like a doctor or nurse, but the tattoos don’t seem to fit into that description very well.

His face is blank, his eyes don’t show much expression but he looks towards the slightly more amused end of the neutral spectrum. The walls behind him are concrete, and he has what looks like a single blue curtain over the only visible window in the room.

Oops, I just messed up the formatting on the page, I guess I’ll have to fix that later...

Anyway, I wonder what his story is. How broad a question that is... Maybe not his story, maybe just the context that led him to taking this exact photo. It looked like it was a facebook post- I can see the “do you want to tag this person?” box around his face.

Terrifying that Facebook now has a facial recognition software and a database of every single photo that’s ever been uploaded of you so that they can continually grow their artificial library of YOU. Your face. Your smile- the way you look by romantic candlelight versus blinding sun. The way your eyes crease when you laugh and the way your facial structure looks when your hair is pulled back from your face.

There probably aren’t even that many real human beings who know that about you, who study you and catalog you as extensively as Facebook does.

Does facebook think about you when you’ve left? Does Facebook miss you when it can’t look through your laptop camera and watch you watch your screen?

Oh Facebook, you’re so romantic! What an age to live in- My computer knows more about me than most people.

Your Google search history can be more telling than the most personal conversations you have with your closest friends. Google probably knows what porn you watch, as well as your favorite foods, your medical mysteries, and your expensive tastes.