Putting on your blog face

I’ve been reading Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction by Joseph Walther as part of my literature review for my great summer project, and one remark he makes relates strongly to bloggers.

The point here is that the information one gives about oneself is more selective, malleable, and subject to self-censorship in CMC than it is in FtF interactions because only verbal and linguistic cues – those that are most at our discretion and control – are our displays.

In other words, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. :^) That may be a bit of an oversimplification, but it does fit well with the amount of site tweaking and customization that bloggers like to do. Having a website with the default templates is like walking into a grade 9 dance with clothes that are 10 years out of fashion (or even 5 minutes out of fashion in the case of Grade 9′s). You may note that on front page of this blog is a manga-ish caricature of me; it is, in other words, my blog face. Not being overly thrilled with having a picture of me up on the web, I have chosen to re-present myself as a cartoon. In his brilliant book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud points out that the face in a cartoon is more generic, more universal, than a specific face, and it therefore is more easily identified with by the reader. I also think it looks better than this:

Yikes! And that’s after my cup of coffee in the morning!! ;^)

BTW, if you want to make your own iconic self, you can do so at Portrait Illustration Maker, which is where I did mine.