SubscribeEgomedia: the creation of your own image
Posted in Visual, Animation, Design, Illustration, Video on November 11th, 2007. By Ona Vinyamata.
We’ve seen it in contents: Internet is the citizen media and citizens have created the tools that let them express in a variety of ways. We can reflect a point of view, a feeling or even what we are (or what we’d like to be).
With users being able to write their own story, moving to the personal field was an obvious tendency. We started writing about what we didn’t quite know (thanks to Wikipedia our ramblings found it’s place) and we ended up talking about us, struggling to show how we feel and what we dig.
The story starts with the Smiley (popularized in the early 1970s), father of the Emoticons and grand-father of the Avatar, king of self-customization and a word that in Hindu philosophy most commonly refers to the incarnation of a higher being, or the Supreme Being onto planet Earth.
The customization factor made avatars a genius way to show ourselves as we’d like to be. In most of the cases no one knows who we really are when in the net, then: why not invent a new personality? Or what’s more important, why not improve the image we reflect?
From impersonal but emotional smilies to static but descriptive avatars, the Internet now gives the tools to express much more than an image. With über popular tools like Facebook we are starting to personalize ourselves as real human beings: we are kind of forced (and less afraid) to use real names and real pictures.
In this setting, individualization comes from expressing with images (because text takes too much time) what we like, how we feel and what we feel for others: from a customized smiley to an avatar that in Second Life dresses with the clothes we’d buy for real if we could afford them, a YouTube embedded video or a MySpace audio that represents us or even a FaceBook tool that enables us to send a visual hug to an other member of the social community.
The image we create of ourselves in the virtual world is an optimistic one. Hided behind our laptop we have the power to show the best of us, to print in our persona all the inspirational habits that advertising has been seeking for our real consumerist worlds. We are, in fact, investing and consuming too to make our virtual alter ego happy.
Now is the time where we can shout out loud whatever we want in a mass medium, but we can also express who we are and what makes as unique from a whole lot of perspectives (one little visual tool at a time).
Psychologists may find in this a great way to pull out what a person really thinks has to give and never dares to say in real life, but we were interested in throwing out the thought of how a “Map of Countries I Visited”, “Visual Ranking of Movies I like”, “Which Celebrities Look Like Me”, “List of Dreams I’d like To Accomplish”, “Send Me a Hug Tool” or a “Send an Emoticlip to Someone” create a complex image. This time of ourselves.
Related Links
“The Rise of Mass Self-Communication”, by Manuel Castells
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