If you’re twenty-one or younger and own a Friendster or Multiply site, or are into YMing (Yahoo Messenger-ing) or RPGs (Role Playing Games), you probably have an avatar or icon instead of a drab, institutional-looking id picture. And for your username for those or for e-mail accounts at Gmail, Yahoo or other web-based mail service, you’ve never used your real name or even your initials but came up instead with a unique screen name like cool_dude8118 or foxyhulababe95 or pswytlga2.

Let’s do a quick Internet 101 briefer. An avatar (according to Oxford American Dictionaries) is “a movable icon representing a person in cyberspace or virtual reality graphics.” PCMag.com defines it as:

A graphic identity you either select from a group of choices or create on your own to represent yourself to the other party in a chat, instant messaging (IM) or multiplayer gaming session. An avatar is a caricature, not a realistic photo and can be a simple image or a bizarre fantasy figure.

And Netlingo says that an avatar is:

A digital “actor” or icon that represents who you are and where you are in the virtual world. 3-D chat rooms and VRML worlds are examples of places where you would use an avatar to navigate your surroundings and communicate with other users. The avatar can be whatever you want, including a cartoon, an animal, or any graphical element. Just be aware that this image represents you.

On the other hand, a screen name is the name a person chooses to use when communicating with others online.

While it can be his real name or a variation of that name, more often it’s an alphanumeric pseudonym of mixed nouns, adjectives or coined words. In some cases, it’s barely pronounceable.

The practice of encouraging screen names started in the early 90’s in large internet user communities like AOL. Nowadays, it’s better for teens and younger kids opening accounts in sites catering to the general public to use screen names. One internet safety rule stresses that minors should never give out specific personal information such as their real names, home addresses, and phone numbers.

What makes adopting screen names so irresistible is the chance to rechristen ourselves with names of our own choosing. Rare is the son or daughter who’s perfectly satisfied with his/her given name. (Sorry Pa, Ma, but Roderick is just so … uncool…especially with the rolling “r”s Pinoys got from four hundred years of Spanish colonialism. Rodrigo would have been a whole lot better; it has a certain cachet about it … he he…)

For Internet Generation peeps, using an avatar, icon or screen name comes easily for you. It’s second nature to you to project yourself online as other than (what you consider) your boring, everyday self. An avatar or icon is particularly attractive. Your representative image in a growingly intense graphics-driven medium can be as cute, heroic, fantastical, or diabolical as you want it to be, no matter how uncute, unheroic, unfantastical and undiabolical (you think) you are in real life.

It can be anything, even an abstract symbol like what The Artist Formerly Known As Prince (But Now Is Back To Being Known As Prince) chose for himself a while back when avatars weren’t even in vogue yet.

Can’t pass up the chance to sport the goggly eyes and scimitar-bladed hairstyle in anime fashion? Swipe (actually, borrow) an image of your fave character striking a pose from sites such as Gaia, post it in your My Profile page and voila! the internet public-at-large can see you as WHO I AM IN CYBERSPACE.

It’s interesting (if a bit disconcerting) to note that the terms avatar and icon so freely adopted in internet lore have their origins in nothing less than fundamental religions.

Oxford American Dictionaries defines an icon first as “a painting of Jesus Christ or another holy figure, typically in a traditional style on wood, venerated and used as an aid to devotion in the Byzantine and other Eastern Churches.” (On a less exalted level, an icon is “a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something.”)

And avatar? It comes from Hinduism. Wikipedia says:

In Hindu philosophy, an avatar, avatara or avataram (Sanskrit: अवतार, avatāra), most commonly refers to the incarnation (bodily manifestation) of a higher being (deva), or the Supreme Being (God) onto planet Earth. The Sanskrit word avatāra- literally means “descent” (avatarati) and usually implies a deliberate descent into lower realms of existence for special purposes. The term is used primarily in Hinduism, for incarnations of Vishnu whom many Hindus worship as God. …

The word has also been used by extension to refer to the incarnations of God or highly influential teachers in other religions, especially by adherents to dharmic traditions when explaining figures such as Jesus or Muhammad.

As the Book of Genesis reminds us, this yearning, this temptation to aspire to be greater, godlike beings is all too human. And unlike the DC and Marvel Comics superheroes familiar to X Generationers (remember when you and your annoying little brother/sister or bossy classmate would fight over who gets to be Spiderman or The Flash or Wonder Woman?), there are plenty of avatars and icons to go around for everyone to pick.

The Sassy Lawyer’s Journal

Graphics and screen names aren’t the only ways to shape your internet alter ego. If you’re into writing, blogging presents another chance to create online personas, as Pinoy Penman Butch Dalisay says:

Another feature of blogs is their anonymity—or at least the option to remain anonymous or to create an online persona such as the “Sassy Lawyer,” “Rambling Soul,” or, in my case, the “Pinoy Penman.” This persona (Latin for “mask”) isn’t necessarily you—it’s your public face, maybe smarter-sounding and sharper-looking than you really are.

I’m not too sure that the notion of anonymity truly appeals to bloggers. Pseudonymity, maybe, which has its roots and adherents in the publishing world of ink and paper. My hunch is most bloggers crave that “not-necessarily-me” public face or online persona Mr. Dalisay mentions.

Trying on different public personas isn’t new for me. I’m a part-time stage actor; have been since I was in Grade 5. Theatre has always been a natural outlet for those of us who want to be someone else even for just a few minutes onstage. In the performing arts, you use your face, body, posture, and voice to transform to this other person. Your costume, make-up, and props complete the transformation, make it believable; they don’t adorn but help concretize the temporary truth needed for audience suspension of disbelief.

As theatre actors are taught, you can’t make the audience suspend its disbelief until and unless you find the truth in the role you play and - the more difficult task - convey that truth to them. And those of us in the theatre-going audience usually come to the show willing to give the players that chance to make us believe.

That may not be the case online. We, the internet public-at-large, are much more critical and less forgiving than any theatre audience. We know that a lot of what has been uploaded in cyberspace is meaningless chatter or unreliable information or lint-laden navel-gazing. There are millions of webpages not worth the virtual paper they’re coded on. So if you want to be a player on the internet stage by casting yourself in the lead of your Multiply account, blog, or site, realize that your audience needs to see the truth in your cybercharacter.

The internet persona(s) you assume, who you are in cyberspace, may be a work of fiction or art or both. And as any artist or writer knows, infused in that work are indelible aspects of who you are as a unique human being.

In the end, you should choose and create these ethereal extensions of your corporeal self as carefully, as lovingly, as you would for anything else worth using your precious free time on.

(P.S. I borrowed most of the images in this article from sites which offered them for free or without any copyright restrictions. If any image used here is in fact subject to such restrictions, I apologize to the owner and promise to remove it or make the corresponding credit attribution if the owner would be kind enough to grant explicit permission for its continued use here.)

REFERENCED LINKS:

I had a lot of fun doing this post, but also spent a lot of time searching for free images. (I wanted to see for myself how easy or difficult it was to look for avatars and icons without having to pay for anything.) The hula-dancing-ukelele-playing girl is a free sample from GIFWorks.com, an online GIF image editor. What I enjoyed most was creating the Rodrigo and animated pswytlga2@hardheded.com graphics logos, which I did online at FlamingText.com, where you can “create cool, custom images for FREE, to use on your website, or in your e-mail”!

Oh, credit also goes to Football ‘98 parent Sarj (a.k.a. Sarah Jane) for the pswytlga2 screen name. I couldn’t have come up with that on my own.

Posted in: Internet Safety, A HEdCen Oldie's POV, Blogging 101, Internet 101 | Comments(0) | April 2007