Chapter seven of Morrison's book, as the title suggests, is primarily about the limitations of both autobiographic and photographic avatars. As noted in other chapters, as well as this one, the girls in Morrison's study were not able to create the ideal avatar, but this leads to discussion over what they actually did, and what that means.
The WeeMee avatars were not able to express everything that the girls wished to include in their avatars, and as most of them made two avatars, they came to express different aspects of their personality. Their political ideas, their dreams, and interests could be incorporated into their WeeMee, but it was impossible to be completely accurate in a literal way in regard to personal appearance. These limitations in choice and style, courtesy of WeeMee's own system, are exacerbated by offline cultural limitations. Morrison argues that the same rationales that one incorporates in their daily construction of identity hold true in the creation of avatars, and while this has both positive and negative implications, as personal statements of identity that are intended for specific audiences, it emphasizes the need to control one's virtual appearance as much as their physical appearance. Thus, editing one's autobiographical avatar lends its rationale to editing a photograph of oneself; an activity that Morrison's informants readily admitted.
When it came to using WeeMee avatars on Facebook, the girls either neglected to exercise that option or only did so for a brief time. It was more important for them to have an avatar that was "current" and the WeeMee avatar proved itself to be quite static despite its observed abilities to express what "kind" of person one might be as opposed to a photo. Along with the ability of photos to be more current, the girls also enjoyed using profile pictures that included their friends, a feature that was not applicable to WeeMee. It's noted that the WeeMee avatars have their own strengths, but it appears that for the girls, those strengths do not translate well to other mediums. Butterflye said it this way, "Creating an avatar, in my opinion, gives you more freedom than a photograph in some ways, and less freedom in others."
The limits of WeeMee customization did have one unanticipated consequence. Because an individual's personality is more complex than can be articulated with something that is most like a paper-doll, the girl's WeeMees remained entirely accurate; just not in the way they were originally intended. So instead of a WeeMee with a broken leg, representing a current physical state, the avatar instead came to express a different abstract quality of the girl.
Morrison goes back to her beginnings and writes, "In the end, the fact that no fat WeeMees existed really didn't matter." Morrison expected the girls to be troubled by the limitations they faced in creating an avatar, and to some extent they were, but not on that particular subject. The creation of WeeMees is not outside of social expectations, and the choices of WeeMee's developers on these fronts actually received a fair amount of consideration. According to WeeWorld's creator Mike Kinsella, the decision of whether to make physical features available is often a matter decided by the community. Citing an incident over "oriental" eyes, he found that WeeWorld's Asian clientèle was not interested. Kinsella contends that WeeMees are people first, as in they are individuals with their own interests and social ties, implying that their physical makeup may figure further down their user's list of priorities.
The distinctions between the autobiographic and photographic avatars in this chapter are definitely worth considering. The fact that none of the girls were very much interested in using their WeeMee avatar in other media (one of WeeWorld's main selling points) is related these differences. I see the environment that WeeWorld has created as having a better use for its own product as a virtual space. The avatars there are more practical for the chat features that WeeWorld offers, in that they can function in a similar way to emoticons. In Facebook, photographs may be more useful for the immediacy that the network works with. Facebook is a very topical site, its users update frequently, and its own folkways support pictures more than cartoons. I agree with Morrison and her girls in that both have their advantages and disadvantages, but I would also contend their strengths are subjective and contextual. There are still plenty of people who abstain from using photos of themselves as profile pictures.
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