On December 24, 2021, I had the honor of being invited to participate in the Yangtze River Delta Digital Creative Industry Development Conference in Hefei as a keynote speaker. The title of my talk is Metacosm: New Opportunities for the Digital Creative Industries. I take Chinese a good wish that has existed since ancient times—to see literally—as the core image that runs through the speech. I do the same in this article.
American communication scholar John Peters pointed out that the history of the development of media technology is the history of the continuous increase in human apparitions/ghosts/avatars, and vice versa. That's why I'm talking about avatars here from a media and communication perspective.
The earliest mode of communication of human beings was "personal transmission", when the main body of communication and the content of communication were always together, so it could allow up to a few hundred people in the "Athenian city-state" to gather. Later, writing appeared, which was the earliest "distant transmission" (long-distance transmission), so the script also became the earliest "embodiment" of human beings.
The word "incarnation" is derived from the Sanskrit word avatar, which refers to the apparition of God. In Hinduism, various gods exist in multiple incarnations on earth. The American science fiction film Avatar, which grossed at the box office in 2009, was originally called avatar in English, and it gave us an idea of the digital meaning of the word.
Stills from the American science fiction film Avatar
Writing, as an incarnation, becomes barren and dangerous as soon as it leaves the immediate support of its author, and thus Plato leaves us what is said to be the world's earliest "media thesis"—he, through the mouth of the King of Egypt, criticizes the written word to Torah, the inventor of the written word, arguing that it is out of the author's control, does not look at the object ("promiscuity"), is not confidential, cannot interact, and is not conducive to human autonomous memory. In a word, the text spreads as the embodiment of the author far less than the dialogue in which the author is present.
But the great communication efficiency brought by words cannot be questioned. It externalizes our ideas into palpable flattening so that authors can examine, modify, disseminate, and print it for peer discussion, debate, and evaluation. There is writing to have civilization, there is printed writing to discover the New World in the 14th century, Martin Luther King Jr. in the 16th century led to the Reformation and the emergence of the Scientific Revolution in Europe in the 17th century, which is the main driving force that pushed human society out of the Middle Ages into modern society (Elizabeth Eisenstein).
Nevertheless, Plato's accurate "words are not as good as dialogue" evaluation 2500 years ago has always lingered for posterity. Words are linear and barren, although the power is huge, but after all, the effect is not as good as "face to face", so whether chinese or Western, human beings always have the good wish of "seeing words as faces", but subject to the limited bandwidth of media technology, it can only be a dream.
In the 1830s, the telegraph appeared, and human communication for the first time achieved the separation of "communication" and "transportation" (James Carey). This meant that the content of the transmission was not limited by the speed of the carriage, ship or train that had previously delivered the mail, but could reach the receiver at the speed of light, exceeding the speed of human reaction to face-to-face conversations— but the content of the telegram became more streamlined and barren, and seemed to be further away from the dream of "seeing the letter".
From the 1980s onwards, the avatars in digital games have been embodied in tennis rackets, spaceships, Pac-Man, first-person gunners, 3D avatars, and more. While its realism, immersion, and interactivity are constantly improving, it has been unsatisfactory until 2021, when the concept of the "metaverse" was proposed, which seems to indicate that we had to control its behavior with a keyboard and mouse outside of the avatar, and today we can wear a VR headset to enter the avatar, and our real-life behavior is the avatar's virtual behavior, and we can transmit this behavior remotely and instantaneously.
Thanks to the convergence of the fruits of information and communication technology development, today we are closer than ever to realizing the dream of "literally" communication. As a result, various avatars (including Teresa Teresa, who has been dead for many years), have overcome space and time to live and realize remote presence, giving people a feeling of "surprise" and "supernatural", and also inspiring many netizens to leave messages expressing their desire to "resurrect" lost relatives through this technology. In fact, the founder of an intelligent virtual human company called Replica in the West was designed to copy a deceased friend of his. Now the company's avatars are popular around the world and have achieved commercial success. I remind us that the good results of remote presence are often the result of a combination of technical capabilities and user imagination.
There are already a large number of artificial intelligence avatars in operation that replace the heavy and impetuous work of humans. Although they may not have an image (android), they do greatly liberate human productivity and creativity, and also meet the individual needs of many consumers. However, there are still many limitations of the humanoid avatars we see at present, for example, at the level of intelligence, most of the avatars can only process very structured data, or run according to the scripts given by human programmers in advance, which is still a relatively rudimentary artificial intelligence; in terms of communication effects, due to the high cost of 3D imaging equipment, post-production development, etc., the modeling efficiency is relatively low, and the algorithm performance of the avatar needs to be further improved, especially the accuracy of real-time facial expression capture and restoration needs to be improved. In short, the current avatar is merely a "agent" of man, not an "actor" with independent behavioral capacity.
However, in front of the public, the performance of the avatar is exaggerated and exaggerated by some companies, which is very performative and confusing, for example, some introductory videos are not "one shot to the end", but through rapid video editing, giving people the illusion that the avatar and the real person cope with the smooth and humorous humor; some companies even use the real person to impersonate the avatar to interact with the user to produce an effect that makes the audience feel incredible. In the long run, this is not conducive to the development of the "virtual avatar" industry.
We believe that in the future, avatars will continue to increase and will have real social impacts in their interactions with humans, which also puts new demands on the communication studies I am working in. For example, beyond "computer-mediated communication (CMC)" there has been an increasing number of "computer(AI/avatar) propagation as another subject," i.e., "human-machine communication" (HMC).
The dominant paradigm in human-machine communication research is the so-called "Computer As Social Actor Paradigm." This paradigm means that regardless of whether the computer/AI/avatar is a real person or not, its users always have a cognitive tendency to regard it as a real person, and acting based on this cognitive tendency will have real social consequences, such as a real person knowing that the avatar is not a real person, but treating it as a real person and forming a relationship with it, for example, in Japan, a man has publicly married a network avatar, which brings new ethical and legal problems.
2021 Vanke Outstanding Newcomer Award winner "Cui Xiaopan". Courtesy of Vanke
In addition, as the number of avatars increases, the gender, race, occupation, and behavioral roles they are designed to affect the real people to which these variables point. For example, in video games, and the avatars we've seen recently are mostly "long-haired, big-eyed, long-legged" teenage girl figures, supposedly females under the gaze of male players and male programmers, a design that shifts and amplifies the male gaze to the public. In addition, the newly emerged avatars, mostly women, whether it is "Cui Xiaopan", "Teresa Teng", "Hua Zhibing", "Guan Xiaofang", "AYAYI", "Liu Yexi", their jobs are inseparable from the professional roles of accountants, singers, female college students, announcers, secretaries, customer service, live broadcast anchors, etc., while professional service work, such as virtual experts and doctors, are often designed as men, which leads to the replication and strengthening of women's occupational types and gender power relations in reality.
Avatars will also pose the risk of identity theft. Today, facial recognition technology is widely used, and if citizens' facial data information is not effectively protected, it is easy to be used to paste "deep fake" photos and videos on virtual people, publish false information, and cause various major problems.
I believe that in the future, human beings will continue to strive forward in the pursuit of the communication ideal of "seeing the word", and the various incarnations will become more and more diverse and full, and will also get closer and closer to this goal (although it will never be finally achieved). But, as with Plato's criticism of the first incarnate text of mankind 2,500 years ago, the new media of the time, we should never be overly optimistic about new media, because they are like double-edged swords that solve old problems and bring new ones. And all new media technologies, whether they are problems or solutions, whether they are opportunities or challenges, ultimately depend on how we humans can use them to the fullest.