The Topless Men Post, or, A Word about Avatars
WARNING: POST CONTAINS SHIRTLESS MEN! DO NOT SCROLL DOWN IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY TOPLESS MEN!
Not that it’s a post about shirtless men, or even about how many times I can cram the traffic-increasing phrase “shirtless men” into a single (shirtless men!) post, but I thought I should titillate warn readers up front. If you scroll down (or have a really huge monitor) you are going to see naked manflesh.
SPOILER: It’s not gonna be that exciting.
Anyway. Internet presence, blogging, generating exposure (hur hur hur), all that good stuff. If it’s something you’re working on, go ahead and do yourself a favor: find a single image of yourself that you like and stick with it.
If you have one little picture by your name everywhere you go, people will be able to quickly figure out that, for example, @GeoffreyCubbage on Twitter is probably the same guy as cubbageg on WordPress, and as far as exposure (hur hur hur) goes, that’s a good thing.
Unfortunately, it’s only an ideal strategy for people who’ve recently had one of those perfect-hair, sitting-in-front-of-a-marbled-gray-screen photos taken lately. For my part, I’m pretty broke and only know photographers who do things like scan raw meat and frame giant prints of the image so that O Best Beloved can hang them right above the table where do you mind I’m trying to eat my pork chop here. It took quite a bit of rummaging through other friends’ Facebook pages to find something even vaguely presentable for my most professional web functions:
And unfortunately, the shot’s mostly a lie. I don’t wear glasses, for one thing (we were going to a costume party), and we trimmed out the part where I’m clutching a glass of brandy like it was the last love of my life (I didn’t really want to go to the party, either). I use it for my articles on Google Knol and a few other internet things, but I find the whole thing a little off-putting, and the end result is most people know me instead as the blurry purple guy in an ancient cell phone photo from the days when a camera in your phone was intensely high-tech.
Yeah, that guy.
I personally think the shot’s an accidental masterpiece, but the unfortunate reality is that I’m both unrecognizable and shirtless, making it a really lousy image to tie my internet persona to. Such is life, and I suppose it could have been worse — we could have gone with something that actually expresses the reality of my life and personality in a tangible way.
Don't ask.
The sad conclusion here is that I’ll likely be the blurry purple guy for a long time yet. What about other bloggers, writers, or just plain ol’ anybody with an active internet presence? Does your photo look like you? Does it represent you even though it doesn’t look like you? Would you like an extreme close-up of scanned raw meat? Drop me a comment…!
I think cell phone photos sometimes get a bad rap — epseically when it comes to avatar images. Mine is also a cell phone image, taken with my own phone by my mother in the Circuit City the day I got the phone to test the phone feature (it was my first camera phone). It’s turned out to be one of the best pictures of me I’ve ever had taken, and I use it for most everything these days.
On the subject of your avatar, I’ve always thought it pretty fitting (And agree with your assessment of it’s accidental mastery). I’ve always felt it’s a very Paul Bunyan-esque depiction (a connection probably informed by the first place I saw you use it, your LJ account and the sort of “folk tale” persona you presented on it). So you may be mostly unrecognizable, and shirtless, and as you point out, there are tangible down sides to both these things, but I think the image works for you — if it ain’t broke, yadda yadda…
As a final aside, I’m not sure that it’s important that your *face* be the recognizable aspect as we move more and more into a culture driven by Avatars (another word that probably draws traffic, yeah?) that don’t *have* be be literal representations of our selves; World of Warcraft (and other MMOs), Xbox and Wii avatars, forum avatars, even names (like my ubiquitous Wyverntark) can come to represent (both as a projection we consciously shape, and as a way that our audiences come to think of us) a sybolic face, or a facet if you prefer, of ourselves, as real as the physical contours of your actual flesh and blood front of your head.
Paul Bunyan, or Soviet Realism — I think that fence in the background adds a very striking visual element, totally by accident of course, that gives it kind of the “worker of the world” feel. Which is, of course, also totally inaccurate!
I personally think you should go with the skirted picture, but I’m kind of sick like that. I was lucky enough to have a very dear and talented friend (also my web-mistress. Yes, I tell her I <3 her frequently) create my gravatar with the stylish initials of my pen-name. It fits my personality, says who I am, but means I don't have to put any photos I might be embarrassed by in ten years out on the web.
Do you know, I’m not sure I ever noticed in all of your various comments that you had the LB up there (the L kind of looks like a T when it’s scaled down this far). I suppose it’s because I always see your name when I’m approving comments, so I never need to add that visual recognition to figure out who’s saying what here.
http://www.anneerickson.net for raw meat.
I think it’s important to add that when the people we lived with made fun of Geoffrey about wearing my “pink” skirt he told them in an offended tone “It’s MELON.” Also you can tell it’s not our room because you can see the floor.
Brilliant, thanks for the link. I couldn’t remember if there was an online gallery or not. It’s linked in the body text now!
Isn’t there a good picture of you on an enormous banner somewhere?
Yeah, the Illinois High School Association put me on their big athletic events banner for a year there, but I have no idea where they got the photo or who I’d get an internet-sized file of it from. That suit was pretty sweet, though, now that you remind me…