OPINION BETWEEn THE LInES
Making Face: Practices
and Interpretations of Avatars
in Everyday Media
liz danzico
School of Visual Arts | [e-mail]

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