Understanding The Avatar

The avatar is a fairly new species. Hidden in plain site within the landscape of our digital world – but mostly overlooked, almost universally misunderstood and generally neglected.

I believe we can’t truly understand avatar marketing (or social media marketing) without gaining an understanding of avatars at a level that reaches deeper than a “best practices” list.  It isn’t easy to create a snapshot, since avatars are elusive, but framing a few things about them is a start to thinking properly about them.

Avatars are the beings that inhabit digital space, although they reach well beyond it.  The avatar is separate, yet indivisible from the person.  It doesn’t reside in a single place at a single time - it doesn’t operate within the constraints of time and space. It is persistent, yet not always present. 

Reality for the avatar is as distributed as their gaze – and their gaze is in constant multi-tasking motion, across the multiple windows on their desktops, across devices, across virtual places, across platforms. Fluidity is a central characteristic of this species.

For the person, time and space define reality.  Reality for the avatar however, is purely of the mind, emotion, and imagination; each fueled by invisible threads made of electronic impulses moving across networks.

A single avatar takes many forms.  It is the individual profile a person creates on any social network site, for example, or it is the 3D persona created in a multi-user virtual world.  However, the “complete” avatar is the totality of all the data elements its person-owner imprints within their networked world: social network profiles, photo sets, blog entries, Google searches, transactions, comments, reviews, wiki entries, tweets, wish lists, digital graffiti, YouTube videos, personas.

The avatar is an endless digital fabrication in constant construction, but always within the structure of each particular place through which the avatar flows.

You can no more define the avatar by a particular space they inhabit at any one nano-moment than you can define the person by a single task, role or responsibility they embrace in the “real world.”  A person is of course an amalgam of many characteristics that for convenience we lump into the concept of “identity” (or for some, demographics, psychographics, technographics). 

The handle of identity gets peeled away in digital spaces.  Of course the person can steadfastly tie his/her real world identity with their avatar, but the reality of virtual space is that people can - and do - float free of their real world identity.  The reality of virtual space is that there are many spaces – nearly unlimited spaces – that a person can float between real and simulated.  The degree to which they do so, is a peculiarity of avatar fluidity.

The themes of identity and fluidity are central to avatar-ness and to new media marketing – you’ll see it resurfacing often in more detail in future posts here.

For the person, their worldview is derived from an intimate, first person point of view.  For the avatar, their worldview is more akin to a third person view.   This somewhat less intimate, yet quite immersive view of “itself” and the environments it inhabits bestows a unique relationship dichotomy between the person and the avatar. Understanding the split avatar-to-person relationship is key to understanding the avatar.

From this relational dichotomy, and the virtual spaces avatars live in, spring a unique concept of presence.  Our language is already beginning to reflect a shift in presence thinking:   “You can find me on LinkedIn,” “ I’ll be in Second Life,” or (referring to my avatar) “Znetlady bought a new pair of shoes today.” 

Presence is perhaps the most elusive characteristic of these beings, which are ever-shifting in shape, attention, place and manifestation.  Avatars transcend space and objects, often frustrating our efforts to communicate with them about the concrete.  As we begin to embrace a new concept of presence, we can make better use of our efforts toward the avatar.

We are just beginning to learn about these beings that straddle two very real worlds.  It feels abstract. Understanding a new culture feels abstract, until we embrace its nuances and they become ingrained in our thinking.  The avatar represents a new culture, a different way of thinking about ourselves in relation to our digital world.

Discussing avatars in the abstract is sometimes necessary in getting the full picture.  My goal is to  find  words and practices that can help us translate our world into theirs (and visa versa) so we can understand them within the context of our need to engage and participate with them.

If you have read this far, you are likely someone who is intrigued by the emerging concepts surrounding avatars - and who has thoughts about them.  Please share them.  And thanks for not minding this short flight into surrealism in an effort capture a blurred snapshot.

Photo Credit: Galatea Zabelin
Flickr location: http://www.flickr.com/photos/studioa-galateazabelin/2333617371/sizes/m/

Comments

[Walter Neary]

Really well put. The concept of "the totality of all the data elements" is very well stated. I think that's was excited me about discovering FriendFeed ... it's a place where you can see how a lot of your web experiences add up, and what they add up to. It's interesting to think how all of this may someday be collected within an avatar.