Metablog

The Presentation of self in Electronic Life: Goffman on the Internet

This paper “The Presentation of self in Electronic Life: Goffman on the Internet” describes various process of self presentation online. The author also juxtaposes presentation in “real” world vs. presentation in the “virtual” world in context to self presentation. In writing this paper, the main goal of the author is to use definitions of “presentation” produced by Goffman for the “real” world and verify if they exist for the virtual world.

According to the author, the most important goal is to appear acceptable, while presenting one’s self. The primary indicator of failure in presenting themselves is embarrassment; it also acts as a motivation factor for people to present effectively. While face-to-face presentation has the drawback of leaking information involuntarily; nonetheless the problem of acceptable self remains in both paradigms.

The author claims that Goffman might not consider web as a medium of interaction as it is not “fact-to-face” since the communication does not take place in the right “frame”; that is the context and the intentions are unknown; while the interaction might be limited if not non-existing it solves the requirement of interaction, which is to establish contact. Web also saves the presenter from embarrassment. Another prominent feature of the web is that it provides the user with full autonomy. They can choose what information to receive and what to discard, unlike face-to-face interaction. Also, unlike conversations, the only information available to the user is the information content on the web page.

The author categorizes WebPages encountered by him that introduce themselves in some way or another; he also provides real world analogies of the categories. The categories include, “Hi, this is me” which introduces the person directly, and the real world analogy is penpal letter. “This is me” kind of home pages are displayed by faculty. The clues to the person may not be in what is said/done, but in how that relates to the structure defined by others who are doing the same thing; analogy to the real world includes student handbook. “Hi, this is us” is a category which entails family homepages and they resemble company report or family circular. “This what I think is cool” are extreme instances of “Hi, this is me” category and contain less about themselves and more about what their interests are. “An advertisement for myself” encompasses categories such as “Cool style”, “The electronic curriculum vitae” and “An advertisement for the service I can provide”. This category is an over-arching category for all the web-pages purpose of the pages is “self promotion.”

The author reinstates that Goffman would not consider Electronic self as a means to interact because self is developed, maintained and presented in an interaction. The closest electronic interaction can get to face-face interaction is via email. The author puts forth the notion that EC might not be rich enough to support interactive development. Also, most of the addendums to EC might be to make EC more like face-to-face interaction; which hints that EC should be developed in a different context.

In conclusion for web to be interactive, we have to wait till we can have an implicit understanding of “frames” that can be applied to the communication on the web.