The closest thing most of us have to a social avatar is the profile picture we use on social media apps—hardly the ambitious three-dimensional graphics that Second Life or Snow Crash imagined. True, profile pictures do provide some sense of who you’re talking to and what they (or their dog) look like. But they’re static. My profile pic has the same fixed, photographic smile, regardless of the message I type beside it. What we really need is a dynamic system. Punctuation is good at representing tone of voice, but we’re still missing something, something embodied. This was the void that
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