icon self- and other-identification

[cimorene]

On social media it's well-known that we associate our friends with their default icons (I've been party to plenty of amusing conversations about friends who look like animals or specific celebrities for this reason - my favorite was cleolinda because for a while basically all of her icons were Galadriel, but they were DIFFERENT icons of Galadriel, which really facilitates picturing her just as Galadriel IN GENERAL and not as, like, a specific image of Galadriel. Made it a more detailed imaginary identity.)

I don't see as much discussion of how we identify ourselves with our default icons, but I remember this coming up a bit from other people even before the death of livejournal, when fandom practice was generally to have a large number of icons for different moods/reactions, topics/fandoms, etc. Even then, I saw some people talking about how they came to feel their default icon was more of an avatar, with a personal connection.

But after a number of years, I really am too attached to my default icon to switch away, when I've thought I'd like to a couple of times.


I recently found a very nice, much cleaner and more high-res scan of it - it's a publicity photo of 1920s singer Helen Kane, who was the inspiration behind the Betty Boop character.

I've made a lot of different



variations over the years (including a MLP version and a couple of others using various avatar/'dress-up doll' generators), but I've found recently that even a color outside of the blue-green range feels weirdly artificial, as if I've dressed up for an occasion and am waiting to go back. A while ago I thought I'd like to be non-anthropomorphic, and I went to a lot of trouble to make some icons with animals from Marimekko patterns, but I couldn't use any of them. It's not that I felt I could never identify with the images, but that I couldn't get used to the idea of the switch away from this one, which just seems so drastic...

...and I feel like Tumblr makes (made... or has made) it worse, somehow?

I've gotten used to how static icons are there, and finding the range of reactions available in an icon limiting compared to all the reaction gifs and reaction images available when they're divorced from one's avatar. (I wanted to hide the icons on the posts on the main page of my blog - and let the icon at the top represent the whole thing -, but I'd have to go tinker with the style in order to hide them on my own blog but keep them on the Reading and Network pages.)

Comments

[cimorene]

That's a good point! They used to take up quite a chunk of screen real estate. And considering how much smaller screens were... I remember making icons on a laptop in 2002 and the icon was something like a fifth of the browsing window height, once you subtracted the start bar and the title bars and the menu bars from 950 pixels or whatever it was.