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

Now that HEdCen.com is up and running, and we’ve been told that we can have our own blogs in the site if we choose to, some of us may have jumped up excitedly and shouted “I want one! I want a blog! … Uhmm … what is it?”

Let me help you out. Up to about three weeks ago, what I knew about blogging was practically zilch. Sure, I was aware that blog is short for Weblog or a sort of online diary (misspelled “diary” first time around as “dieary”; looks ominous…), but that was about it. Oh, and that blogging could also be a profession, like for some people I know (he-he).

So what is a blog? Why would you or I want to have one at HEdCen.com?

Let’s take a look at the definitions of blog as Google summarizes them. Done? … Ok, great! We can take bits and pieces from here and there and use them to describe what a HEdCen.com blog is, which might go something like this:

If I am a HEdCen student, parent or teacher, I can have this space in the HEdCen.com website where I can write about what I’d like to share with the world in general and especially with other HEdCen people mostly. Even if I have little or no technical background, as long as I know how to connect to the internet and go to the HEdCen.com website, it’s easy to type and publish what I wish to write in my personal online journal in HEdCen.com.

I can do this as often as I’d want, whenever I feel like putting in words my thoughts and ideas, like what made me happy or sad today, or how annoying it is to have a little brother and just about anything else that may or may not be important to you, but which I care enough to write about, even if it’s just to let you know what the lyrics of the new HEdCen alma mater song to be sung at this year’s culminating activity are, in its solemn version.

In other words, to blog is to make my presence known in the cybercommunity. To blog is to “virtually” be.

So, to be, or not to be? To blog, or not to blog?

Ay, had the Bard been a Blogger, those are the questions a suicidal Hamlet may have pondered. Recall the rest of that immortal speech:

“…Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.”

Wikipedia’s entry of this famous Shakespearean passage says:

The simplest summary of Hamlet’s speech might read “Life is so wretched that suicide would be preferable—except that we’re too afraid of what might come after death.”

Bummer of a dilemma, isn’t it?

Writing a blog is really a lot like Hamlet contemplating suicide, but in a good way. In the vast theater of the digital world, from a lonely spot at downstage right, you launch into a soliloquy (”an act of speaking one’s thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers”) on anything you care enough to write about, regardless of any readers.

For a part-time stage actor, doing Hamlet online wasn’t such a bad idea.

I made this commitment to help Webmissy put up HEdCen.com, mainly by contributing factual content, such as the history, teaching philosophy, and other information about the school (which I’d collated some time ago for work I’d done in my professional capacity). But we didn’t want a ho-hum run-of-the-mill kind of site for the school we cared about. We realized we needed articles with a uniquely HEdCen flavor. And with Webmissy taking care of website development and generously bankrolling the project with her bandwidth and other resources she’d smartly accumulated on her way to becoming a top professional blogger locally, someone else had to write the articles. That someone would have to be …

You guessed it.

Comes now this newbie at blogging but oldie at HEdCen, unto this Honorable Community, respectfully states and avers as follows:

The first article I submitted for posting was Futbol Mania and the Mutants of The HEdless Center (Our Obsession with The Beautiful Game). At my request, Webmissy posted it on the Home Page with no byline. We wanted to to create a bit of mystery and start generating a buzz for the site. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As I’ve said at the start, I’m new to blogging and hadn’t done any creative writing in years. Here I was, planning on submitting initial content for the site, something more than the usual Welcome Remarks sort of thing. Choice of main topic? Soccer was the hands-down (not feet-down?) winner. It’s the national sport of the sovereign state of HEdCen.

I started writing out the article in Word. It took me nearly a week and more than a dozen revisions before I mustered the courage to e-mail it to Webmissy for posting. After it was posted, we had to correct some stealth typos that managed to slip under the edit radar, activate hyperlinks embedded or listed in the article, and make the fake Online Survey look real, complete with a faux Submit button. Webmissy did all these herself because I didn’t know the first thing about the tech side. It felt odd having to rely on Webmissy to polish my work; I’m such a control freak. But make no mistake, I was happy with how it finally turned out. Kudos to the site-boss!

Nonetheless, I resolved to do my next post differently, and I did. I went straight to the blog Webmissy had set up for me (called Celebrity Sound Alike since I had the same sounding name as this young male singer romantically linked with Ruffa Mae Quinto, and not because I sound like him when I sing; nice touch, Webbieboss ). I figured I’d better learn asap how to use the Wordpress MU platform so I could do my own editing and not have to bug Webmissy for every tiny little thing I wanted to tweak in my future posts.

So out came the first draft of An Inconvenient Truth (A Shameless Way to Publicize Our Launch, etc.). There was just one small problem: My first draft was LOUSY and unfit for public viewing. But rather than Save, I had already clicked on the Publish button, which meant it was “out there” with my byline on the Celebrity Sound Alike blog page, warts, grammatical errors, unidiomatic expressions and all. I panicked and wanted to roll over and die of literary shame, or commit the first act ever of hara-kiri online (how to do that, I had no idea).

Then, before I could scrounge around for a tantō (the short sword or dagger for performing seppuku, which is the more formal term for hara-kiri), I hit upon The Perfect Excuse. Why don’t I just say that both the site and the article are Works in Progress!?!

After all, as far as HEdCen.com was concerned, it still is in the building up process. A lot of the links don’t work yet (patience, patience) and we’ve got empty pages galore to drive cenophobes up the (blank) wall screaming “Horror vacui, horror vacui!” (We’ll have more on phobias later. This is what they call in courtroom practice Laying The Predicate.) Thus, even the original title of the article An Inconvenient Truth (A Shameless Way to Publicize Our Launch, etc.) has since mutated to A Work In Progress: The 24 March 2007 Official Launch of HEdCen.com – Our Third Home (99.97% Draft).

I know, I know. It’s a cop-out, but somehow it made sense. So long as I have The Perfect Excuse, whatever I’d already written didn’t have to be (by my standards, at least) The Perfect Post. I could always claim in self-defense that “Well, ack-chuayllee, you know, it’s not yet 100% finished. Just like the site, it’s, you know, a Work In Progress, and I’m a merciless editor of my own work, so, you know, the Final Product may turn out, you know, radically different, you know, as in, you probably won’t remember what I wrote when it originally came out, which is, you know, lousy.”

Yet, even armed with the Perfect Excuse, I couldn’t completely shake off the dread I felt whenever I’d think of the possibility that the crawlers at Google might have taken a snapshot of that lousy draft and made it the No. 1 result for [“lousy draft” or “bad blogging”].

So here I am again, all set to try and overcome the resurrected fear of blogging. (I’m also wondering if it’s already a recognized psychological disorder, this fear of blogging.) So what did I do?

You guessed it. I procrastinated… and just Googled [“fear of blogging” phobia] (the brackets represent the Searchbox, so you know exactly what keywords I used) and lo and behold, there were 22 results, several of them referring to blogophobia and those who suffer from it as blogophobics (logical but, uh, unimaginative).

(For comparison, try Googling [“fear of commitment” phobia] and you’ll get 12,800 results. Strangely enough, it’s called commitment phobia. The rule is, to find the, or create a, name for a phobia, you take the Latin root of the English word you are afraid of, then add –phobia, which means that the Latin root of the English word “commitment” is, wouldn’t you know it, “commitment.” I suppose the same reasoning goes for blogophobia.)

There you go. It’s official. Blogophobia exists. And chances are, you may have it even before you (never) make your first post.

I’ve got this theory. While it’s certainly not the sum of all our fears, methinks the fear of blogging is the sum of one’s several fears. Why so? Allow me to illustrate rather than explain.

Example:

Cyberphobia: Fear of the internet +
Scriptophobia: Fear of writing in public = Blogophobia.

The above equation is straightforward and self-explanatory. Also predictable and insipid.

Let’s try another one. Here’s what I call the Triple C:

Cyberphobia: Fear of the internet +
Coprastasophobia: Fear of constipation +
Commitment phobia: Fear of commitment or intimacy = Blogophobia.

Ahh, a bit more pizzazz, but (except for the first phobia) rather obscure, and I’d rather not get into the details, even if you threaten to slice me up with a tantō.

And then, here’s my personal favorite, a 6-phobia kombination I kall the K Formula:

Kainolophobia or Kainophobia: Fear of anything new +
Kakorrhaphiophobia: Fear of failure +
Katagelophobia: Fear of being ridiculed +
Kathisophobia: Fear of sitting down +
Kenophobia: Fear of voids or empty spaces +
Kleptophobia: Fear of stealing = Blogophobia.

While the above examples are no slouches, I know you guys can do a heckuva lot better. Therefore, I propose to hold a contest. Put those Kumon-honed skills to the test (note the Japanesey theme as we segue from hara-kiri to Nippon-style math, and don’t you just love those anime theme songs and can’t wait to have Sir Roi and Mr. Eddie K do a guitar-sax arrangement so we don’t have to sing those unintelligible lyrics). Come up with your own equation to show why the fear of blogging is the sum of several phobias.

There’s a catch though. The only way to join this contest is …

You guessed it. You have to WRITE YOUR OWN BLOG.

P.S. Despite the mistakes I’ve committed so far, blogging wasn’t the life-threatening experience I thought it could be, not with the help of some positive rules I’ve adopted. Here they are, my Personal Blogging Guidelines (not yet complete; thus also a work in progress):

I SHOULD:
1. Come up with a catchy title.
2. Customize for HEdCen community. Mention specific teachers, students, events, etc. Include football, ecology and other HEdCen concerns.
3. Embed reference links such as The Core Rules of Netiquette. (See Blogging Tips 101 tutorial on how to create hyperlinks.)
4. Give information and tips for newbs (short for newbies, or newcomers to cyberspace).
5. Poke fun at myself.
6. Use the active voice.
7. Include English grammar rules and examples. Check the dictionary for definitions and the thesaurus for synonyms and antonyms.
8. Italicize lahat ng Filipino words.
9. Put HEdCen.com in bold font.
10. Coin a new catchword or phrase, e.g. Hedless Mutants, Our Third Home.
11. Edit, edit, and then edit again. And again.
12. Insert emoticons only when necessary, because they’re baldies like me, and cute (not like me).
13. Include Study Guide and Review Questions.
14. Post a fake or genuine Online Survey once in a while.
15. Have Related and Referenced Links at the end, even non-existent ones for HEdCen people mentioned.
16. Edit, edit, then edit again. And again. And a couple of times more, ‘til I believe it’s the best it can be, given the limits of my skill and talent.

Please feel free to accept, adopt, modify, use, or not use, any, several or all of the above. A few aren’t new (nos. 1, 6, and 11 have been around for decades); some have evolved in recent times (nos. 3, 4, 12, the second part of 14, and the first part of 15). Nos. 4 and 7 lend an air of legitimacy to this HEdCen.com post, while most of the rest are quirks I just enjoy. And finally, there’s just no escaping two of the Guidelines (actually just one, the repetition at no. 16 was upon the insistence of my OC persona, who hovers over my shoulder every time I write). So there.

Remember: Write or die. Publish or perish. Blog or commit hara-kiri online.

STUDY GUIDE AND REVIEW QUESTIONS:

1. True or False: According to the article, blogging is a better alternative to suicide.

2. Which of the following did William Shakespeare not write?
a) Romeo and Juliet
b) Macbeth
c) As You Like It
d) Futbol Mania and the Mutants of the HEdless Center (Our Obsession With The Beautiful Game)

3. Horror vacui literally means “fear of empty space” and according to Wikipedia (see link below) the term is applied in visual art as “the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with ornamental details, figures, shapes, lines and anything else the artist might envision.” The question is: If a painter has horror vacui, does she scream the whole time before she finishes her painting until she fills in that last unblemished bit of canvass with a dab of permanent ink?

4. Can you forever traumatize a cenophobic writer suffering from writer’s block by giving him a blank piece of paper?

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. For you cenophobes out there, stop screaming and would you like to write out your own questions for nos. 5 to 11 just to fill up all that horrible white space?

13. If you have triskaidekaphobia, would you dare read this question?

RELATED AND REFERENCED LINKS:

Hamlet’s Soliloquy: To Be, Or Not To Be
Hara-kiri or Seppuku
Tantō
Horror Vacui
The Phobia List

Posted in: Blogging 101, HEdCen.com launch | Comments(2) | March 2007