OPINION BETWEEn THE LInES
Making Face: Practices
and Interpretations of Avatars
in Everyday Media
liz danzico
School of Visual Arts | liz@bobulate.com
From the time I woke to the
time I sat down at my office
desk this morning, I counted
24 different social interactions,
both face-to-face and mediated by technology. Each one
of these interactions required
me to make an assumption or
rely on known etiquette, in the
absence of knowing the true
state of affairs. I had many
questions, and their answers
were not directly perceivable: Is
she friendly? Is he going to be
trustworthy? Does he remember how I like my coffee, or do I
have to tell him again? Will she
get the assignment in on time?
In our everyday social inter-
actions, there is a natural,
unspoken currency we use
to exchange information that
often goes unstated but dic-
tates much of how we inter-
pret behavior: our face. Erving
Goffman, in his seminal essay
“On Face-Work,” defined face
as the social value a person
claims through patterns of
verbal and non-verbal acts:
an image of one’s self. “Face-
work,” as he describes it, is
the actions taken by a person
to make whatever he is doing
consistent with his “face.” A
person, then, establishes a line
by which he can communicate
during any particular contact,
whether face-to-face or medi-
ated [ 1]. Today businesses are
distributed differently, global
collaborations among people
are more prevalent, and social
interactions have different
meanings. But that doesn’t
mean face matters less. In fact,
its definition may have gotten
more interesting.
senting the embodiment of the
user that can also refer to the
personality connected with the
screen name, or handle, of an
Internet user [ 2].
Neal Stephenson, author of
cyberpunk novel Snow Crash,
most likely popularized the
term in 1992, using avatar to
mean “online virtual bodies.”
But it wasn’t until 1996, when
America Online introduced
buddy icons with its free version of instant messaging, that
avatars became more widespread. Yahoo! was the first
to adopt the official “avatar”
name for its own instant messaging service [ 3]. Now with
Automattic’s Gravatar (
globally recognized avatar) service,
which allows people to have
one avatar across multiple sites,
millions of avatar images have
been served billions of times
per day since its official launch
in 2007 (before that, Gravatars
were unmaintained).
[ 1] Goffman, E.
“On Face-Work.” In
Interaction Ritual. New
York: Anchor Books,
1967.
[ 2] Porter, J. “On the
Origin of Avatars.”
December 8, 2009.
http://bokardo.com/
archives/on-the-origins-of-avatar/
the avatar descent
“Avatar,” which is derived from
the Sanskrit word for “descent,”
is a user’s self-representation,
whether in the form of a three-dimensional model used in
computer games, a two-dimensional icon used in online communities, or a text construct
found on early systems such
as MUDs. It is an object repre-
more work
There’s etiquette at play both
in face-to-face communications
and via digital presentation of
self with respect to face work.
Diplomacy and savoir faire
encourage an individual to
marry the immediate situation
with his or her expressions,
[ 3] Avatar (computing)
http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Avatar_(computing)/
May + June 2010