Every time I send an email, I see myself staring back at me. I always have a slight, knowing smile on my face, even if the content of my email is confused, distressed or brimming with unrestrained glee. I chose the image (maybe unconsciously) because it seemed professional and direct, and also because my hair looked good. Smug email me is not my only online incarnation. There are dozens more of my avatars scattered across the web.

The word “avatar” originates in Hinduism, where it refers to a god descending to the earth in mortal form. In Hindu theology, Vishnu assumes various earthbound avatars — among them a fish; a tortoise; a half-man, half-lion — in an effort to restore order at times when humanity has descended into chaos. Now we’re the gods, reinventing ourselves online in the hope of bringing order to a realm we can’t quite keep under our control.

Our avatars represent a self-image that’s fractured across dozens of sites and text bubbles and email chains. We present ourselves differently on Twitter and Tumblr and Slack depending on the norms built into each space. On Facebook, I’m posed by a professional photographer, waist contorted into a slimmed line, eyes peering up out the window of a skyscraper. On Snapchat, I’m burrowed into my office chair, blankly blinking my eyes open and closed. On Candy Crush, I’m a cartoon man-otter. I don’t particularly know why I’ve selected these avatars as my representatives; it’s some combination of my read on the platform’s sensibility, my emotional state at the time of upload and the suite of photos I had on my phone at that moment.

But as I traverse the Web, I naturally scan for subtle clues in the avatars chosen by friends and strangers, reading their U.S.A.-themed scrapbooks and cat GIFs like leaves at the bottom of a teacup. On Twitter, an avatar flipped to Beyoncé in “Lemonade” or Prince reads like a pledge to a newly materialized online club; a bizarre cartoon points to a person who tweets frequently and with open self-loathing; an unhatched egg that appears automatically upon profile creation has become its own anti-avatar avatar. The latest avatar trend turns you into a cartoon character in your own life. With the Bitmoji app, you can conjure a comic-strip image of yourself to emote over email, Twitter and text. And Mii­tomo, a new mobile game from Nintendo, makes the gamification of our social lives explicit — in it, when your impish avatar socializes, you win piles and piles of digital coins for your trouble.