My Avatar vs. Doubleleaf’s Avatar
There are endless possibilities as to what shape or form a person’s avatar can assume. In some cases, on such websites as facebook and myspace, the avatar is typically a picture of the person to which the web page belongs to, though there are certainly deviations from this norm, as some people will opt for digital or computerized images or drawings done by hand. While hand-made illustrations constitute only a small percentage of the display avatars of networking sites such as those listed above, they make up a considerably larger portion on the website “deviantART,” which is a networking site where thousands of artists post their original pieces on their own individual pages, similar to a blog, and allow their art to be viewed by anyone who happens across it. On such a site as this, it is understood as something of a “common courtesy” that you post an original work of art as your avatar.
In this respect alone, the avatar image that I have selected (posted above) is different from mine, as this artist’s icon was hand drawn (with the possibility that photoshop was used to perform “touch up” functions and fine tune the little details to make it more aesthetically pleasing in its coloration), while my avatar (also posted above) was created completely through the use of an online avatar generator. Given that mine was designed online through a website with preset options, while there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of possible combinations that I could have manufactured, there were limitations due to the fact that there was only a certain amount of options. However, in the case of Doubleleaf (the artist’s identification tag on the website), she had complete freedom to draw whatever she desired. While it could be argued, conversely, that she was limited to the space on her paper or the extent of her artistic abilities, the truth is that she had far more freedom in what she was allowed to do. She had the option of the angle that she wanted to draw her image from, whether she wanted an image of just a face or a complete full body shot, the color of the clothing, the shading on the face, everything was under her control in the creation of the avatar. In this sense, her user ID is far more personal than mine, as while all I was capable of doing on the program I selected was to pick and choose from a variety of options and decide which combination I liked best, she was allowed to decide from the beginning exactly what it was that she wanted, and control every step of the process of its generation. The majority of the remaining differences link back to the process in which they were made. For example, the quality control of the site I chose did the best that it was able to, but there were still several minor flaws that were perhaps overlooked. The most notable one was the conflict with the first hairstyle I chose and the Santa hat. The original hairstyle I selected was far larger than the one I have now, and when placing the Santa hat on it, instead of the program accommodating for the discrepancy in size by cramming the hair (figuratively speaking) into the hat, like people often do in real life, the two layers overlapped, and the hair did not fit within the boundaries of the hat stuck out to the side, which made it necessary for me to readjust the image by selecting a different, more moderate hair style. However, in the case of Doubleleaf, she could have made the accommodation on her own by making the hair, regardless of how obnoxiously massive it may have been, fit inside whatever size hat she wanted, had she been in the same predicament while hand drawing her picture.
Aside from the obvious similarity that both of the avatars are male and have similar facial hair patterns, the only truly profound similarity that they have in common is that each of them represent something that characterizes each of us through our interests. On my end, the dark clothing represents my preferred style of dressing, the Santa hat signifies an accessory that I enjoy wearing around the Christmas season, and the sword allegorizes my past affinity towards medieval weaponry, which led me to start a collection of various objects such as swords, axes, knives, and the like. In the case of Doubleleaf, her avatar represents a key interest in her life as well in the form of a video game character. Instead of choosing to design a character that mirrored/gave a representation of herself, she selected to draw a character that already existed. Her avatar takes the form of a “fan art” drawing of Malik, a character in the first Assassin’s Creed video game. By glancing through her profile and discovering facts about her such as her favorite video game being listed as Assassin’s Creed, her personal quote being “Safety and peace, my brother,” (a quote that comes directly from the game), and the fact that the vast majority of her artwork is Assassin’s Creed oriented, it is fairly safe to assume that selecting a character from this particular game is an accurate reflection of her interests.
There is one aspect of her avatar though that does interest me: the fact that her avatar is a he. When I first stumbled upon this artist and complimented how much I liked “his” work, my girlfriend, who showed me the page, pointed to the profile information in the top left of the screen which listed the artist’s gender as female. The reason that I made this mistake was not due to some sexist approach in which I naturally assumed that all the artists on the site were male. In fact, as far as I had seen there was a remarkably low population of male artists on this particular forum. Instead, it was because I had made the assumption that the artist’s icon was representative of her gender, and had been sorely mistaken. Such incidents though are not uncommon in cyber space, as one such MUDder once said that when he “viewed MUDs as a REAL reality,” he fell in love with a female character, but as it “turned out ‘she’ was a he.” Another topic brought up by this is a word that Belle and several others term ‘hypergendering,’ which could be described as being the online malleability of gender, and how in several situations it is difficult to discern a person’s gender because of the nature of the site and because of the ambiguity and anonymity created by the internet, and how very easy it is to masquerade as another gender. While in the case of Doubleleaf, exploring “new eroticisms” (as Belle points out as the motive behind such people’s actions who masquerade as different genders in his book An Introduction to Cybercultures) was definitely not her intention. She was merely trying to represent a part of herself by drawing a picture of a character from her favorite game as her user ID. Though this does bring up the issue of cyberspace being a male dominated arena, and how my mistake of assuming that Doubleleaf was male may be me subconsciously categorizing her as male due to the fact that she is online. Lourdes Arizpe, a contributor to the collection Women@Internet calls on women to take a stand against the male dominance of cyberspace by creating “the meanings of tomorrow” through creativity, and especially calls on young women, who have the creative and free spirit necessary to inspire this change. Perhaps unknowingly, Doubleleaf is being one of those young women, for as her impressive list of artwork commissions displays, she has made a visible impact in the “deviantART” community, and is being requested by a variety of people to draw something for them. Through her skill in art, she is helping to forge a way for women in cyberspace, for as she made her presence known on the internet and turned it into a rather lucrative business, she helps to light the way for other women to follow.
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