Are We All Becoming Our Avatars?

What is the difference between your physical and digital self? 

This may seem like a silly question. Obviously, your physical self eats, breathes, sleeps, talks, and interacts with others. Your digital self - whether it is an avatar in a virtual community like Second Life, a profile on Facebook or Linked In, or just a username in a forum - is just a projection. But think about the amount of time you spend using or acting through that projection. If it is just a projection, why do you care about it so much?

Any user of social media, whether consciously or subconsciously, creates one or many calculated identities. These online identities – the motives for creating them and their existence in general– have important psychological and cultural significance.

Maybe Avatar was a hit because we could relate to it?

For society to adjust to social networking and digital technologies, users have adopted new definitions of interpersonal communication and interaction. We have created new languages and interpretive codes oriented around the encoding and decoding of digitally transmitted messages, and we have grown to accept digital projections as replacements for physical reality. Cyberspace has become a valid site for human interaction – on par with coffee shops, classrooms, work offices, and any other form of face-to-face interaction.

Could it be?

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the message." His ideas followed that the media and technologies a society uses, not the content the mediums carry, have societal significance. Though different mediums engage users in different ways, each serves as an extension of the body. The technologies people use, and thus extend themselves with, provide insight into the psychological underpinnings of the society they belong to.

Social media technologies have allowed users to extend their bodies into virtual communities. The increased use of digital communication technologies and social media simultaneously encourages hyperconnectedness and discourages face-to-face interaction. By transferring emphasis from material existence to the digital sphere, social media users have more power to strategically calculate their virtual selves and the ways they present those bodily projections to others. These digital projections affect the creator's perception of self, of others, and the ways others perceive the creator’s physical person. Over time, these altered perceptions cause changes in societal norms and expectations.

Cartoon by Hugh Mcleod

Social networking users have no control over the ways others will interpret their constructed identities once they are created. Users can adjust aspects of their profiles, but when they sign off, their virtual selves remain in cyberspace for other users to interact with and judge. Misuse and misinterpretation of personal information can be uncomfortable and sometimes harmful to the profile creator. Why, then, would social media users take such a risk?

One reason is community. Social networking profiles are a bridge to a cyber-community with its own set of behavioral norms and expectations for self-presentation. Users may be aware of the vulnerability, superficiality, and calculated nature of the profile, but to opt out of social media is to opt out of an entire social realm that gains more and more cultural clout every day. By opting in, users submit to the social networking communities' expectations and written and unwritten codes of conduct.

A "map" of online communities based on actual online traffic from bandwidthblog.com

Every social media user consciously chose to use social networking as their medium for self-preservation and social connectedness. If the medium is the message, the individual profiles are only a product of a larger cultural phenomenon. Social media has changed society’s definitions of a social community. Social media users consciously and actively participate in changing their perception of themselves, of others, and of society in general – within the social media community and outside of it as well. The more social media users participate, the more they give life to the medium, until the need to differentiate between users’ corporeal selves and their digital representations becomes obsolete.

From a marketing standpoint, the blurred line between the physical and digital worlds is significant. If online identities and virtual communities are becoming more and more legitimate, a brand's presence in social media puts it on par with other profiles, and subsequently, other people. As Groundswell suggests, people trust other people more than they trust companies. If a brand exists on the same plane as a person, it is easier to relate to and carries more influence.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964): Understanding media: the extensions of man. New York: Mentor