CHRIS ROPER: Identity crisis
The way we think about identity, and the importance we place on it, is based on assumptions that are tenuous at best. The more we focus on similarity rather than difference, the better the world will be
One of the gems of the internet is a site called AllLookSame.com, which started in the early 2000s. It shows you a series of pictures of Chinese, Japanese and Korean people and asks you to guess the ethnicity of each person. Or do I mean race? Perhaps it’s both.
Dyske Suematsu, who conceptualised and put up AllLookSame, explains on the “about” page: “One evening at a Japanese restaurant, my girlfriend (now wife) and I were talking about her facial recognition problem. I thought of creating a website that tests people’s facial recognition ability. She thought it would be more interesting if the site was about telling Asian people apart. And, this is how this site came about.”..
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