Mentioned yesterday that I was feeling rather philosophical, and I think I'll explore that again. Unfortunately, there's been about 24 hours' worth of lag-time, and I can't quite recall where I was going with such thoughts.

Let's see, yesterday, I wrote about Avatar, so let's see where that takes us...

"Avatar" itself is the Sanskrit word for incarnation, or manifestation as in a god's physical manifestation on Earth. Funny how in the general translations, Christ is never referred to as an avatar, or "god in the flesh." Funny how that comes to mind as I write this week of Christmas (speaking of which, Happy Solstice, everyone).

Religios interpretations aside, the term today has come to represent not so much a manifestation, but as a projection. I can go onto my Facebook friends' list and find at least a half dozen WoW avatars, not to mention the myriad other games where this is commonplace. Moreover, in so many facets of today, our avatar is, in fact, often our digital projection to the world-- it is the form we choose to take in social media, MMOs, message boards, podcasts, YouTube channels, or even of characters in tabletop RPGs

What do we choose to project? So many of us have found Facebook to be a fine replacement for the Class Reunions of generations past (personally, I'm on the fence about what I'd do with a Class of '01 invite). Friends, acquaintances, even enemies are brought together via Walls and Apps and Games which span from the melodramatic years of high school to the quasi-established "adults" which so many of us have become ("and of my goodness, so-and-so has a baby!"). Who are we? Many are mindful of our web-presence, and the most careful of us minutely scrutinize personal information disseminated to the Web.... but where is the line between dissemination and scrubbing?

There are no shortages of anecdotal tales about embarrassing information posted by oneself or one's friends, but from what we control, what is chosen?
"This profile photo hides my double-chin,"
"Am I in a relationship, or an it's-complicated?"
"Why should I post that I still have the same job I did at 18?"
"Let's just make sure that everyone knows I have a Master's degree"
and what is that line between our avatars, the personalities we want others to see, and who we truly are?

Cinematically, an excellent addressing of this idea stretches back a decade (yes, friends, it has been a decade) to 1999's The Matrix. Although this metaphor is quite literally backward-- in The Matrix, we live as digital projections ignorant of our physical reality-- many points still hold. Consider the "residual self-image," how do you truly view yourself? Your mind's projection of your physical appearance... what is seen in the psychological mirror? And do we bend our image to our will, or better yet (as shown by Neo), is our image of the world bent to us? Okay, it probably stretches my point to the edge of breaking, but the question remains.... what is our projection?

In the end, so much of our daily avatars move back to the ancient interpretation-- the mundane actions of a god. As gods of our own universe, like Neo, we define our reality by our interpretation of it; it goes without saying that a physical reality exists of its own accord regardless of whatever interpretations we have have, but as the image which we project to the world, and that of the world which our mind projects to ourselves, one asks, how are these reconciled? Can they be? Should they be?

What's your avatar?