Why We’re Obsessed With Facebook’s Avatars, GIFs & Animal Crossing’s Villagers

Expression surrogates augment our communication.

This past week, the internet’s GIF repository, Giphy, was acquired for $400M. Replying to Snap’s Bitmoji, Facebook’s Avatars reached the U.S. And Animal Crossing’s success continues to spur countless headlines.

The common denominator beneath these stories? They’re all illustrations of the ways in which we’r…