Abstract
Since virtual identities such as social media profiles and avatars have become a common venue for self-expression, it has become important to consider the ways in which existing systems embed the values of their designers. In order to design virtual identity systems that reflect the needs and preferences of diverse users, understanding how the virtual identity construction differs between groups is important. This paper presents a new methodology that leverages deep learning and differential clustering for comparative analysis of profile images, with a case study of almost 100 000 avatars from a large online community using a popular avatar creation platform. We use novelty discovery to segment the avatars, then cluster avatars by region to identify visual trends among low- and high-novelty avatars. We find that avatar customization correlates with increased social activity, and we are able to identify distinct visual trends among the U.S.-region and Japan-region profiles. Among these trends, realistic, idealistic, and creative self-representation can be distinguished. We observe that the realistic self-expression mirrors regional demographics, idealistic self-expression reflects shared mass-media tropes, and creative self-expression propagates within the communities.
Highlights
V IRTUAL identity images—ranging from avatars in video games and virtual reality to social media profile portraits—have been the subject of sustained research recently because of their central role in identity construction both on social networks and in online video games. Research such as [1] has underscored that “Avatars in virtual worlds and social media can impact people’s self-perception in the real world and provide proxies for people to engage in communities as players, learners, and doers.”
We find interesting patterns among both low-novelty and high-novelty segments, and when graphing novelty-versus-image-count, there is no clear point of division between the “normal” and “abnormal” avatars
Self-reported expertise is correlated with novelty, which points to a link with engagement. These effects make sense if there is a correlation between novelty and customization effort. This result is confined to users with public profiles, since we do not have data on the social networks or activity of private profiles
Summary
V IRTUAL identity images—ranging from avatars in video games and virtual reality to social media profile portraits—have been the subject of sustained research recently because of their central role in identity construction both on social networks and in online video games. Research such as [1] has underscored that “Avatars in virtual worlds and social media can impact people’s self-perception in the real world and provide proxies for people to engage in communities as players, learners, and doers.”. Date of publication May 15, 2018; date of current version December 23, 2019.
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