Twitter has changed the default profile picture for new accounts from an egg on one of seven different background colors to what they described to Fast Company as a “gumdrop-headed human.” They claim the human is genderless, and that is technically true, but society insists that the default gender is male and for my purposes right now in this blog (and at no other time) — so do I.
Twitter product designer Jeremy Reiss told Fast Company that the goal of the design was to reflect a collection of words. Here it is: “generic, universal, serious, inclusive, unbranded, and temporary… an empty state, essentially.” Yes, these are also words you could use to describe the 2014 film Boyhood.
The new Twitter default profile pic, which was necessary because the old one was so deeply and irrevocably associated with trolls and bots and all the other seedy, unnecessary parts of Twitter, is a small gray man. I can’t wait for him to call me a “feminazi” in my mentions.
pic.twitter.com/aUs4YAiPxw
— Jason O. Gilbert (@gilbertjasono) March 31, 2017
On the surface, the redesign is logical and pretty funny. What has an actual egg ever done to me? Nothing that I can recall right now. What has an anonymous man veiled in shadow, protected by the internet’s capacity to keep them at a remove from responsibility, ever done to me? Hmm, do you want the stats for just today? One time I wrote about a Mark Wahlberg movie unfavorably and a boy told me that I deserved to have my legs blown off. You can see already how this redesign makes more sense.