Diversity and Self-Representation

The question of how people represent themselves online has been fraught with complexity since the earliest days of social media. I have been intrigued by this for a long time, especially after living in parts of the world which use modified versions of the standard roman alphabet – or a completely different one altogether – and still navigating the technology and online spaces. I want to now present my thoughts and experience about digital diversity, as part of #23things.

Self-identification is an issue which people need to address in their earliest days of internet access, like what should be your first email address, and user names for different online fora. I for example was so boring that my first email address was the suggested gordon_douglas@hotmail.com. When the time came to replace it, the first idea that came to mind was to represent that I was born in Canberra. This has the added benefit of making it easier for other people to remember, after I give it out.

Curiously, communities form even at this early stage: I remember a friend – whose address was an numbered variant of doorhandle_@hotmail – being approached by other people with doorhandle_ addresses, organising out of spite for whoever had claimed the original doorhandle of hotmail. This included “hacktivists” from vastly different areas, including him in suburban Brisbane.

Social media and games further allowed the potential to customise a virtual character so that it appeared nothing like you. You could be part of the Orcish Horde in World of Warcraft, or one of various alien races in Mass Effect, and no one would really care about your real-world demographics like gender, height, or ethnicity. Virtual worlds like Second Life took character customisation to its extreme, allowing people to express themselves as having giraffe heads walking on springs instead of legs. 

Real-world demographics do penetrate these virtual worlds, however. English is easily the dominant language of Internet users, with Chinese as a strong second [I suspect that this is only modern simplified Mandarin, but may also include Cantonese and Taiwanese]. Russian is only meant to account for 109M users globally, but seems to be very active in a number of specific communities. These include several of my favourite computer games, as well as Bitcoin mining. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Internet subcultures have also developed over the past decade, with a stereotypical link between Koreans and Star Craft 2 for example, and other games being released explicitly based on Chinese and Japanese history and mythology, to counter the traditional European default.

What this means is that language barriers still arise. How do you join or join a conversation with someone you met online, but whose name you can’t read? 

Indeed, default Internet users are still assumed to be people like myself: younger, Caucasoid, Anglophone, able-bodied, and male. Even with evidence that females gamers make a growing portion of the market, and that 50% of all internet users are from Asia – not to mention growing numbers of people with disabilities – old habits die hard. The major producers still see North America as their main market, and so continue to populate their characters with Caucasian and African Americans. 

Robertson, Magdy, and Goldwater, in their 2018 study on use of skin tones in emojis, found that the lightest skin tones were the most popular in personal communications, particularly in Asia. This may have a relationship to how anime traditionally depicts otherwise distinctively Japanese ways of life, but with characters of Caucasoid appearance. They noted however that people with regular and reliable internet access are more likely to be of lighter skin-tones themselves, and so are more likely to be digitally active and visible. In North America, with 94% internet penetration, the use of various skin-tones is markedly more equal than in other parts of the world, further reinforcing the existing relationships between ethnicity, poverty, and access to technology. 

The above study was based on the difference between uses of digital icons where the skin-tone could/not be changed. The default is still a bright yellow, such as in the Simpsons or the typical smiley-face stickers. There is still a great case to be made for virtual escape-zones, where the characters or avatars are so far removed from real-world ethnicities as to be meaningless, in terms of working backwards. 

Online spaces were not intended to be political, and indeed, there is fierce backlash against “political correctness gone mad” and “social justice warriors” taking over. Real-world politics has also become fixated with denouncing “identity politics”, and yet, what is politics if not about identity? We commonly describe ourselves to others by our occupation, which carries a range of demographic assumptions. We are encouraged - at least in traditional political institutions - to self-identify by where we live, but we will curiously tell people which sports team we support freely, while information like ethnicity or country of birth has to be actively sought. People have always been diverse, and it should be no surprise that their diversity carries over to the internet.