People also bond with one another’s avatars. It literally becomes an extension of yourself and your identity. If you have an avatar, even if the avatar is a green monster, and you use that avatar repeatedly to represent yourself and interact with people you actually care about, it becomes you. I've seen eight year old boys make their avatars look super jacked. Is your avatar a little skinnier than you are in real life? Is it a little prettier? People definitely use their avatar aspirationally.

And maybe it doesn’t look exactly like me, but it looks enough like me that it represents meįor that reason people can use Bitmojis aspirationally. The cartoon version of you is the cute version of you, and that’s a big part of why people love it. There are other apps where you put your picture onto a character, and it’s like 'uggh.' If you are too realistic, it gets creepy. If you are too generic, you have no meaning. On the other and is the smiley face, which could be anybody or everybody. On one end you have a photo of yourself, the most realistic representation. In cartoons and animation there is a spectrum of symbolic representation. There is a reason your Bitmoji doesn’t look exactly like you (and your Bitmoji you is cuter!) And in our new world, your digital representation of yourself becomes increasingly important and your ability to represent yourself and express yourself and interact with people becomes more and more important.

We are moving into the future where the division between your life and your digital life is going out the window they are merging into the same thing. Your Bitmoji avatar is your digital identity. I believe with all my heart this is an inevitable evolution of communication. Because Bitmoji adds that identity, it is not a fad. For all of human history there has always been a face to communicate with and that changes the meaning of what is said. But as much as people love emojis and as big as they’ve gotten, they are still missing a key thing: identity. They add feeling to conversation and allow you to tell if someone is being sarcastic or sweet.

Emojis have become popular in recent years because they fill a gap people didn't even know they had.

Matching bitmojis