Expressive visibility: How avatars enable and constrain visibility in digital work

Abstract

As work becomes increasingly digitally mediated, questions arise about how workers remain visible to one another. Prior research has highlighted two main forms of visibility in digital work: behavioral visibility, based on digital traces of activity, and communicative visibility, based on the observability of asynchronous exchanges. However, the growing pervasiveness of avatars as visual and synchronous representations in digital work introduces novel and underexplored dimensions of visibility. In this review, we conceptualize expressive visibility, which is enabled by avatars and characterized by agentic, multimodal self-presentation. It encompasses five dimensions: (1) presence, (2) non-ve..