Image source: http://criticsunknown.com/slideshow/google/
In March, google released a range of aps intended to 'enhance' the experience of its online chat forum, Hangouts. According to a recent article in Slate, the most popular of these aps is 'google effects', an application which enhances your experience of Hangouts by enhancing your appearance: it allows you to adorn your chatting visage with a range of masks which are digitally mapped to your face, moving when you move and "retaining proper size and orientation as you lean forward and back or sway side to side" so as to give the appearance that you are wearing them in real life.
As you can see from the image above, the masks are cartoony and over the top: they do not so much enhance your appearance (in the sense of making you foxier) as they do hide it. Seth Stevenson argues that it is this very disruption of the reality of your face that makes google effects so popular (and useful): it obscures the visibility of your facial expressions and takes the pressure off the need to look a particular way while interacting online. This, for Stevenson, ironically allows users to interact with less emphasis on visibility, rendering Hangouts more like traditional orality oriented forms of communication like the telephone.
While I agree that google effects may well lessen the pressure of online chatting (and possibly increase its utilisation)(who hasn't been put off skyping sometimes as a consequence of a bad hair day/desire to have the conversation on the toilet/etc), I think there is something else going on that is not just about reducing visibility and rendering Hangouts more like the traditional invisible talkiness of the telephone. Rather, google effects allow us to use masks as a graphical shorthand to communicate complex emotions - turning us into the fleshy manifestation of emoticons.
In this way, google effects foregrounds the prismatic nature of online identity: by adding an additional layer of artifice to the digital visage, it forces us to think twice about who we are, and implicitly evokes the fact that identity itself is artifice; that the layers of selfhood are unendingly constructed, that we are masks all the way down to the bone. In this way, google effects insists on a narrative of digital identity in which the emotion/emoticon is a simulacrum, dissimulating (in the baudrillardian sense) that there is nothing beneath the sign.
And just as a geographical map interprets (and imagines) territorial space, so to does the mask of google effects precede (and configure) online identity, replacing the parody of a real world mask with the pastiche of a prismatic digital self. This evolution of the performance of identity for the digital realm recalls Jameson's insistence that one of the defining features of postmodernism is the replacement of parody by pastiche. What, then, are the implications for digital identity of what I'm sure will be increasingly complex and 'realistic' (hyperrealistic?) augmentations of self? Is it simply empowering us to self satirise (or go to the bathroom while we chat) or will the avatarisation of self online have real implications for the way in which we understand and perform our identities in the webisphere (and beyond?)
And what of the content of the mask? At what point is an obama mask an obama mask, and when does it turn into an obama face? (yes, that is a true blood reference, with a little touch of point break thrown in for good measure). Will we see an explosion of efforts to trademark our face to prevent our online impersonation? At what point do the things that you say while wearing my face defame me?
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