But mock up a Bitmoji avatar in your image, and all of a sudden, “you exist.”īitmoji’s success is underpinned by its avatars’ physical precision.

It’s just a collection of some information and photos and stuff,” Bitmoji founder and CEO Jacob Blackstock told me recently. “Social media doesn’t allow people much of a presence. We interact on them through “profiles,” textual and visual dossiers of our personalities and interests and groups of friends.

They’re “platforms,” new stages for exhibiting our authentic selves. Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr aren’t virtual-reality experiences. The rise of social networking deflated this idea of a discrete virtual identity. Avatars could look like humanoid drones (the ones you pushed around in the life-simulation game The Sims), or robotic cyberpunks (the role-players who populated the “virtual world” of Second Life), or bright little cartoon images of woodland animals or Zodiac signs (the “ buddy icons” AOL users chose to represent themselves). The Web used to be framed as a brave new world, so unlike “real life” that you had to shed your terrestrial form and build a digital you to navigate the Information Superhighway.

Cute bitmojis