After posting some thoughts a month ago about Erving Goffman's classic sociological text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, I heard from a reader who urged me to try out a deeper work of Goffman's, Frame Analysis (Harper Colophon, 1974). This blog presents the thoughts that came to mind as I made my way through that long and rambling work.

Let me start by shining a light on an odd phenomenon we've all experienced online. Lots of people on mailing lists, forums, and social networks react with great alarm when they witness heated arguments. This reaction, in my opinion, stems from an ingrained defense mechanism whose intensity verges on the physiological. We've all learned, from our first forays to the playground as children, that rough words easily escalate to blows. So we react to these words in ways to protect ourselves and others.

Rationally, this defense mechanism wouldn't justify intervening in an online argument. The people arguing could well be on separate continents, and have close to zero chance of approaching each other for battle before they cool down.

When asked why forum participants insert themselves between the fighters--just as they would in a real-life brawl--they usually say, "It's because I'm afraid of allowing a precedent to be set on this forum; I might be attacked the same way." But this still begs the question of what's wrong with an online argument. No forum member is likely to be a victim of violence.

We can apply Goffman's frame analysis to explain the forum members' distress. It's what he calls a keying: we automatically apply the lessons of real-life experiences to artificial ones. Keying allows us to invest artificial circumstances--plays, ceremonies, court appearances, you name it--with added meaning.

Human beings instinctively apply keyings. When we see a movie character enter a victim's home carrying a gun, we forget we're watching a performance and feel some of the same tightness in our chest that we would feel had it been ourselves someone was stalking.

Naturally, any person of normal mental capacity can recognize the difference between reality and an artificial re-enactment. We suspend disbelief when we watch a play, reacting emotionally to the actors as if they were real people going about their lives, but we don't intervene when one tries to run another through with a knife, as we would (one hopes) in real life.

Why do some people jump eagerly into online disputes, while others plead with them to hold back? This is because, I think, disputes are framed by different participants in different ways. Yes, some people attack others in the hope of driving them entirely off the list; their words are truly aimed at crushing the other. But many people just see a healthy exchange of views where others see acts of dangerous aggression. Goffman even had a term for the urge to flee taken up by some people when they find that actions go too far: flooding out.

I should meekly acknowledge here that I play Nice Guy when I post to online forums: I respect other people for their positions, seek common ground, etc. I recognize that forums lose members when hotheads are free to roam and toss verbal bombs, but I think forums may also lose a dimension by suppressing the hotheads, who often have valid points and a drive to aid the cause. One could instead announce a policy that those who wish to flame can do so, and those who wish to ignore them are also free to do so.

How much of Goffman's sprawling 575-page text applies online? Many framing devices that he explored in real life simply don't exist on digital networks. For instance, forums rarely have beginnings and endings, which are central to framing for Goffman. People just log in and start posting, experiencing whatever has been happening in the meantime.

And as we've heard a million times, one can't use clothing, physical appearance, facial expressions, and gestures to help evaluate online text. Of course, we have graphics, audio, and video on the Internet now as well, but they are often used for one-way consumption rather than rapid interaction. A lot of online interaction is still carried on in plain text. So authors toss in smileys such as :-) and other emoticons. But these don't fill the expressiveness gap because they must be explicitly included in text, and therefore just substitute for things the author wanted to say in words. What helps makes face-to-face interactions richer than text interactions is the constant stream of unconscious vocal and physical signals that we (often unconsciously) monitor.

So I imagine that, if Goffman returned to add coverage of the Internet to Frame Analysis, it would form a very short appendix (although he could be insufferably long-winded). Still, his analyses of daily life and of performances bring up interesting points that apply online.

The online forums are so new that we approach them differently from real-life situations. We have fewer expectations with which to frame our interactions. We know that we can't base our assumptions on framing circumstances, such as when we strike up a conversation with someone we've just met by commenting on the weather or on a dinner speaker we both heard.

Instead, we frame our interactions explicitly, automatically providing more context. For instance, when we respond to email, we quote the original emails in our response (sometimes excessively).

And we judge everybody differently because we know that they choose what they say carefully. We fully expect the distorted appearances described in the Boston Globe article My profile, myself, subtitled "Why must I and everyone else on Facebook be so insufferably happy?" We wouldn't expect to hear about someone's drug problem or intestinal upset or sexless marriage on Facebook, any more than we'd expect to hear it when we're sitting with them on a crowded beach.

Goffman points out that the presence of witnesses is a frame in itself, changing any interaction between two people. This definitely carries over online where people do more and more posting to their friend's Facebook Wall (a stream of updates visible to all their other friends) instead of engaging in private chats.

But while explaining our loss of traditional frames, I shouldn't leave the impression that nothing takes their place. The online medium has powerful frames all its own. Thus, each forum is a self-contained unit. In real-life we can break out of frames, such as when actors leave the stage and mingle with audience members. This can't happen within the rigidity of online technology.

It can be interesting to meet the same person on two different forums. The sometimes subtle differences between forums affect their presentation on each one. They may post the same message to different forums, but that's often a poor practice that violates the frames on one or more forums. So if they copy a posting, they usually precede it with some framing text to make it appropriate for a particular forum.

Online forums also set up their own frames within themselves, and these frames can be violated. Thus, a member may start a discussion thread with the title "Site for new school," but it may quickly turn into complaints about the mayor or arguments about noise in the neighborhood. This breaks the frame, and people may go on for some time posting all manner of comments under the "Site for new school" heading until they are persuaded to start a new thread or take the arguments elsewhere.

A frame, for Goffman, is an extremely broad concept (which I believe weakens its value). Any assumption underlying an interaction can be considered part of the frame. For instance, participants on forums dedicated to social or technical interactions often ask whether it's considered acceptable to post job listings or commercial offerings. In other words, do forum participants impose a noncommercial mandate as part of the frame?

A bit of history here can help newer Internet denizens understand where this frame comes from. When the Internet began, everything was run over wires owned by the federal government, the NSFNET Backbone Network. All communication on the backbone was required to be noncommercial, a regulation reinforced by the ivory-tower idealism of many participants. Many years after private companies added new lines and carried on their business over the Internet, some USENET forums would react nastily to any posting with a hint of a commercial message.

Although tedious--despite the amusing anecdotes--my read of Frame Analysis was useful because I realized how much of our lives is lived in context (that is, framed), and how adrift we are when we are deprived of those frames in today's online environments--cognitively we know we are deprived, but we don't fully accept its implications. Conversely, I think that human beings crave context, community, and references. So the moment we go online, we start to recreate those things. Whether we're on a simple mailing list or a rich 3D virtual reality site, we need to explicitly recreate context, community, and references. It's worth looking for the tools to do so, wherever we land online.