What sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity

I just finished Erving Goffman's classic sociological text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. A friend told me to read this for an exploration into what "identity" means online, and I did find that the book offers some useful frameworks.

I have to admit, to start with, that it's a rather distasteful work: personally, I don't see my entire life as a performance and everyone around me as an audience. That seems to be just what Goffmn wants me to do. (He calls this attitude his "dramaturgical perspective.")

Furthermore, the book was published in 1959, just before the social revolution of the 1960s exploded the expectations of formality it documents--all the assumptions about proper behavior, social distinctions, making a good impression, and so forth. These distinctions remain, of course, but people tend to behave in ways that consciously disavow differences in class and status instead of highlighting them (at least in the United States).

Goffman's underlying framework is still valid, though, and it casts a useful light on some of the dilemmas of going online.

His fundamental contribution is how he slants his premise that we present a front in all our behavior before others. You have to understand that this posturing is real and pervasive, but rarely a consequence of out-and-out deception, or because we have succeeded in deceiving outselves. Usually we simply associate certain behaviors as appropriate in certain circumstances; some stylization is inherent in our interactions.

For instance, just as a certain attention to style--or a stubborn flouting of its demands--enters into the clothes we choose to wear in public, there is inherent artificiality in our choice of screen name on a social network (unless an account related to our real name happens to be available). And whatever we choose certainly expresses something we want to reveal about our nature. This doesn't mean we are deceiving ourselves or others--we are being ourselves, but in a stylized manner.

Goffman's approach certainly applies online, because our postings--even our instant messages--are more deliberate acts than our informal behaviors in real life. Although some participants play at being flippant and spontaneous on Facebook walls and microblogs, they must have greater consciousness of their effects on the viewer than most dinner table guests or concert attendees. Our online personas, therefore, conform even more closely to Goffman's idea of everyday life than our everyday life does.

Second, Goffman points to the importance of a separation between spheres of action that lets us tailor our actions to our setting. Most institutions have a "front stage" where workers focus on the impression they make upon the public, and a "back stage" or back office where they can interact freely in order to get their work done expeditiously.

Eliminating the distinction between front stage and back stage not only degrads the workers' performance but causes intense distress--yet that is exactly the situation on most Internet forums. Very rarely can people collaborating or sharing information on a public forum pull aside into a private space.

Even if you request a private chat session or exchange of email, you take the risk that your correspondent will save the exchange and leak it to others (the taboo against revealing internal conversations, firmly enforced by teams in everyday life through their social ties, is significantly weakened during Internet interactions), or that the secret communication will come out through a subpoena or malicious break-in. And many online forums discourage private conversations in order to enforce an ideal of transparency: the right of all to participate in decisions.

On the Internet, it is also nearly impossible to use the implicit signals that team members reserve for each other in real life--a kind of "side channel," to use a popular term from the field of digital communications--such as when a salesperson slips a word into a conversation with the customer that has a special meaning to a fellow salesperson.

Under certain extreme circumstances, Internet users can develop hidden signals--see, for instance, Guobin Yang's book The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, which I reviewed a few weeks ago--but the difficulties of developing such signals usually prevent Internet users from collaborating in the construction of those side channels.

That the Internet suppresses implicit signals such as body language, and maps poorly to high-context cultures, is well known. But what we can learn from Goffman is that the elimination of all these nuances reduces the effectiveness of team behavior when they interact in groups with other participants who have differing interests or viewpoints.

The Internet is also famous for preserving and broadcasting the faux pas that, in everyday life, are witnessed by only a few people. The dangers of being caught "off-mike" are greater than ever, and what might, in the past, have eroded over time into a vague rumor now becomes an ever-present, presence that can never be disavowed.

Furthermore, people who witness faux pas in real life may, because of the context, possess enough sympathy for the transgressor to ignore the gaffe and refuse to talk about it later. But the global reach of the Internet brings in many far-flung witnesses who feel no need to show the transgressor any respect.

Goffman cites some differences between cultures in the behaviors they expect and how they interpret those behaviors. The Internet, of course, flattens all public expressions without regard for culture. If you strip off some clothes and dance with members of the opposite sex at a party, you depend partly on the cultural context (as well as the guests' regard for what you do in other settings) to judge your behavior appropriately. If a video of that dance is posted to the Internet, it is subject to all the prejudices of viewers coming from other cultures, as I described in another article.

Much has been made of the discardability of Internet personas; if we don't like who we are (or who others have come to see us as) we supposedly can simply start over. But I think the ability to quietly withdraw from Internet activities and reappear under a different pseudonym has greatly decreased since the days of USENET forums. Most of the groups we engage in expect us put up profiles, and cross-linking profiles is also encouraged. The strain of trying to maintain a totally fictional persona is so taxing that only a determined con artist or post-modern adventurer is likely to try.

Goffman also describes a two-edged or, as he puts it, "discrepant" role that has a particular implication for the Internet. He describes how people relax their performance in the presence of family members or colleagues whom they treat as confidants. Although the role of confidant is usually assigned with great care, some people publish secrets from their careers in memoirs, seemingly bringing in the entire public as their confidants. Modern bloggers do this all the time, offering their readers the impression they're peeping into the blogger's private thoughts, as opposed to the public face he or she must maintain in official settings. When such private thoughts are published to the world (or even a corporate intranet), I'm left wondering what "meta-private" thoughts lie behind the private thoughts.

Our conscious presentations of self are often meant to be scaffolding, which--as Goffman points out--can be taken down once it has performed its purpose. For instance, we put up a front in a job interview or our first date with a potential partner, knowing that we can gradually relax the front if the initial contact is successful and leads to commitment.

But on the Internet, our front is being presented to the entire world for all time, and therefore can never be relaxed. We also have to worry, even more than real-life performers, over the essential question of whether we can sustain our performance.

And this leads to the ultimate dilemma in Internet identity. The artificiality of our participation online, and the limited scope of available media, suggest that the Internet will never let us show our true selves. But other characteristics--the persistence of information and the ease of recombining information from different places--suggests just the opposite: that we can't conceal our true selves for long. It all depends on what characteristics of the individual you consider true: the "wet" versus the "dry"--the inner soul versus the worldly behavior.

A lot of what Goffman wrote in 1959 seems outdated. And a lot more seems obvious, because the various guises people use have been the subject of literature and commentary from earliest texts we possess in civilization. Goffman is more chronicler than analyst, I've found, but his categorizations and conclusions can still be helpful when we suddenly find ourselves in new social settings--where the Internet never ceases to thrust us.