Jared Braiterman, a principal at Giant Ant, recently showed me some of their work from their on-going research on youths and technology (dubbed "Mobile China China Mobile").
Here's an excerpt from one of their visual reports, entitled "Chinese Students Rarely Use Their Own Photos As Avatars" (download):
The research result is that, of the profile pictures analyzed, only 4 of 200 Chinese students abroad used their own picture as their icon versus 58 of 200 Americans.
Yet the sample contains some bias: the data for the Chinese users came from a BBS called 未名空间 while the American sample was UC Berkeley students' blogs on Livejournal. Additionally, UC Berkeley students are far from homogeneous: I would say that the Chinese-Americans occupy a middle space between the two and therefore dilute the results.
Regardless, the original statistic, 4 of 200, stands. Yet, it's the remaining 196 that is interesting. For example: why do people like to use baby pictures, and is that actually them as a baby?
Here's a Flickr stream of more Giant Ant research artifacts, or you can read my 15-minute analysis on MySpace CN vs US profile pictures (blogged back in April).
Here's some anecdotal evidence to add to the very statistically unsound study in this post :)
Posters on the BBSs that I lurk on here in Shanghai are very sensitive about privacy issues. They always mosaic-out the faces of bystanders in the photos they post, and many of them are very careful not to reveal their true identities. Just like in the study above, very, very few of them use their own photos as avatars. Here's a thread where this issue comes up:
http://metrofans.sh.cn/forum/viewthread.php?tid=20482
(the picture in the first post, which you can't see without registering, is a photo that a forum poster took of a subway driver napping in the driver's seat of a subway train)
Posted by: Micah | August 26, 2007 at 12:40 AM
Oh, and Virtual China is accessible in China again. Congrats ;)
Posted by: Micah Sittig | August 26, 2007 at 12:41 AM
Cool forum post. If I get time, I'm going to plough thru and translate it :)
Woo! You know, I almost set up a mirror server but never got round to fully implementing it :p
Posted by: Jason | August 26, 2007 at 10:43 AM
I think it is important which website did you get data from. for in some social networks website they would like to put their own picute.
Posted by: | September 07, 2007 at 06:43 AM