Face Your Avatar

...A Social Experiment

Some Background

Being a member of deviantART and having developed many amazing connections with other members, I feel that deviantART is a very personable and friendly place.  However, depending on where you go on deviantART, what symbol you have, or the kind/quality of artwork you submit, you could have a very different perspective of the deviantART community.  With such inequity, I got thinking about the communication dynamics that exist deviantART.  Having taken too many communication classes in college, I can tell you that the fundamental principle of communication is that communication does not happen in isolation.  Interpersonal communication is contextual, and it’s something that we need to always be mindful of when crafting social experiences. That said, I'm starting a social experiment to improve interpersonal communication on deviantART. Please allow me to explain...

Hypothesis

The deviantART community will be more personable, friendly, and healthy if we can increase the amount of members who represent themselves with their photo.

Concept & Rationale

In online communities, communication is fundamentally impersonal.  There's a simple reason for this: it's unnatural. If you ever experienced a long distance relationship, a phone interview, studied abroad, or worked remotely, you know how much effort is required to overcome communication barriers.  Barriers exist because natural communication incorporates non-verbal context—things like body language, expressions, tone, voice, presentation, etc.  Fundamentally, one of the best ways to improve context is to incorporate face-to-face communication.  With that in mind, I believe that you can make yourself more available to connections with others if you set a portrait of yourself as your avatar.  The ‘intimacy’ of talking face-to-face undoubtedly fosters more personal behavior and natural communication.  After all, it's harder to be a jerk to someone in person than it is behind their back. Likewise, I think it's harder to flame someone if you see their face instead of an anonymous pixel image.  And subconsciously, I think message recipients can invest in a more genuine conversation if they can associate a face to the message sender. That said, I believe that deviantART's community would be quite different if most people used their picture as their avatar.  Sure, we're an art site and photo avatars may not be as awesome as some animated pixel art; however, there's still plenty of ways to get creative with photography.

Join Us

If you're feeling up to it, join in the experiment and face your avatar! Set a picture of yourself as your avatar (and deviantID if you're really motivated). Let's test and see if my hypothesis proves true... Thanks for your support!