Since the advent of the digital revolution, the concept of identity has been increasingly difficult to pin down. Only a decade or so ago, back when terms like "search engine" or "social networking" were not the cultural juggernauts they soon would become, identity was defined only in terms of the individual. Now, due to the limitless bounds of the Internet, a user's "identity" can change on a whim, adapting and evolving to the newfound freedoms online. More and more people are beginning to "negotiate their fantasies and fears in different coordinates of space and time" (Kunkle 1), blurring the lines between traditional, face-to-face interactions. For instance, my student job entails that I email guest lists to concert venues. I have never once interacted with my contacts face-to-face, or even on the phone. The only sense of personality I have of them is derived from impersonal, to-the-point emails. We are at the forefront of this new technological revolution, and social critics and scientists alike are scrambling to answer emerging, relevant questions. Is a person's Facebook profile a true indicator of who they are? Can a simple, prefabricated avatar be a viable substitution for someone's "real" appearance? After making my own avatar for this website and viewing the work of others, I can answer these questions with a hearty, "No!" While the usage of a cute, pre-packaged avatar may seem like a fun way to represent a blog online, they merely further the gap between online and "real life" identity.
For our assignment, we were told (digitally, no less) to create an avatar that represents the blogger within us. This raises a slew of exisential questions: how can I fit my entire personality into a 250x250 pixellated box? Would even an image of myself truly represent how I feel? As Timothy Binkley states in "Digital Dilemmas," even the pictures we use to define who we are "just bits and bytes like figures on a spreadsheet" and there is "nothing intrinsically visible of image-like about them" (Binkley 3). Embracing this concept, I decided to visit http://www.planetcreation.co.uk/createpic/, a site that can generate a cartoon-like avatar of one's choosing based on a pre-set number of hairstyles, faces, and expressions. I clicked the images, picked out a face that sort of looked like me, changed the hairstyle to a pleasing unnatural brown , and presto! There "I" was, staring blankly back at me, ready to take credit for the work I will soon write - a soul enriched with ones and zeros. As Lacan stated, "Where in the signifier is the person?" (Apter 371). My avatar, something used to represent me on the World Wide Web, is completely the opposite of who I actually am. This thing has no emotions, no feelings, no sense of the past, and no thoughts about the future. It simply exists in a man-made haven, a byte in a machine.
As I cruised through some music blogs, I encountered one avatar that was particularly perplexing. One blogger's avatar was a picture of a turntable playing a record, something I thought was painfully ironic. Here was a blogger, sharing his thoughts in ones and zeros, offering a download of an MP3, music in ones and zeros, and received feedback from others in ones and zeros. The entire thing was so far removed from vinyl records and turntables, the only music format that's actually physical. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not some snooty, golden-eared audiophile who scoffs at any music that's not on wax (I'm the proud owner of an iPod). The mere fact that this blogger was using a picture that was so far removed from what was actually presented perfectly encapsulates my dislike of avatars. Avatars perpetuate the Derridean concept of différance, endlessly distancing the user from others (Norris 408).
With the omnipresence of Facebook and other social networking sites, it seems as though everyone has an "alter-ego" on the Web (myself included). Despite the immediate benefits of having one (Facebook Chat is pretty handy sometimes), these pages don't even come close in representing our true selves. An inhuman avatar, whether it be a profile picture or a generated smiley face, can simply not stand in for what is supposed to represent: humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment