"You look soooo totally hot in your profile pic!" "I know, right!"

“All the World Wide Web's a stage" (Pearson, 2009) - a modern twist to Shakespeare's classic line from As You Like It. One that encompasses both aspects of my topic that I wish to explore with today's post; Erving Goffman's presentation of the self, and how this is achieved by teenage girls on their MySpace profiles. In her wonderfully useful article,
Pearson (2009: 1) highlights the following:

Online, users can claim to be whoever they wish. Like actors playing a role, they can deliberately choose to put forth identity cues or claims of self that can closely resemble or wildly differ from reality. With the rise of Web 2.0 and the growth of social networking sites, the virtual spaces for these portrayals of alternate identities seems near endless.

She also suggests:

That individuals perform their identity is not a radical concept. Developed by Goffman (1959), identity-as-performance is seen as part of the flow of social interaction as individuals construct identity performances fitting their milieu. With a heightened self-consciousness (Chan, 2000), online environments take his construction of performance to another level (boyd and Heer, 2006). SNS platforms provide areas which are disembodied, mediated and controllable, and through which alternate performances can be displayed to others (boyd, 2006).

I would firstly like to begin by giving a brief overview of Erving Goffman's ideas in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and then focus more specifically on the aspects that are relevant to how teenage girls present their identities on MySpace.


The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life centres on dramaturgical principles such as impression management to discuss the context of human behaviour and identity construction. Goffman posits that individuals employ dramatic techniques in order to present themselves to others, and also to control the impressions that are both given and given off during such performances. Despite these efforts, Goffman suggests that “the ‘true’ or ‘real’ attitudes, beliefs, and emotions of the individual can be ascertained only indirectly, through his (sic) avowals or through what appears to be involuntary expressive behaviour” (1991: 13-14). I will return to this point later regarding its relevance to online
interactions. Goffman also notes that “a ‘performance’ may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” (1991: 26). Performances are then broken down into 'front' and 'back' regions; the place where the performance is presented, and where it is prepared,
respectively (1991). I would like to quote Goffman again, as I continually find there is no better way to explain what he is putting across than in his own words;

It was suggested earlier that when one's activity occurs in the presence of other persons, some aspects of the activity are expressively accentuated and other aspects, which might discredit the fostered impression, are suppressed. It is clear that accentuated facts make their appearance in what I have called a front region; it should be just as clear that there may be another region - a 'back region' or 'backstage' - where the suppressed facts make an appearance.

A back region or backstage may be defined as a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course. There are, of course, many characteristic functions of such places. It is here that the capacity of a performance to express something beyond itself may be painstakingly fabricated; it is here that illusions and impressions are openly constructed...Here the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character (1991: pp 14-15).

With Goffman’s basic ideas about self-presentation outlined, it is now possible to explore how they can be applied to teenage girls and their use of MySpace to create online identities.


MySpace serves as the stage upon which teenage girls act out, or perform their identities for others. It becomes the ultimate performance, making impression management a relatively simple task. They seek to define the online situation through personalising their profiles with backgrounds, pictures, information and music that they wish to be identified with, which allows others to form impressions of what type of person they are. They manage these impressions by first gauging or having an understanding of what is 'cool' amongst their peers and others online by looking at others' profiles (boyd, 2007) and then deciding how they can portray an image of themselves to others through the use of the different tools available. From this, the impression that is 'given' is made up of these conscious decisions about what will appear on their profile, and as a result, very little is 'given off'. As boyd states, "people have more control online - they are able to carefully choose what information to put forward, thereby eliminating visceral reactions that might have seeped out in everyday communication" (2007: 129). In terms of Goffman's ideas about impression management, this would indicate that as a result of almost no unintentional activity on MySpace, the 'true' or 'real' aspects of these girls' identities may be very difficult to discover.

In terms of the front stage/back stage dichotomy, it would appear that the 'self' or role being played out online through the MySpace profile is the front region, and the back region is made up of primarily the girl sitting behind the computer screen, and everything that she has omitted from her profile that is a part of 'who she is', but contradicts the
image of herself she is presenting online. Goffman states;

Given the fact that the individual effectively projects a definition of the situation when he enters the presence of others, we can assume that events may occur within the interaction which contradict or otherwise throw doubt upon this projection (1991: 23).

This can create problems if someone who only knows the girl from her MySpace profile meets her offline; if it is found that she was deceitful about one aspect of her online persona in comparison to her 'real life' identity, it can bring into question everything she has posted on her profile. The most common way this occurs is with the photos that girls
post to their profiles.

Both girls and boys say they enjoy recording and preserving the images and  sounds of their teenage lives as they happen. They are a surprisingly nostalgic tribe, anxious to archive their youthful memories before they have even slept on them. Georgia has 16 files full of photos of her and her mates stored on her computer. She loves watching them randomly flash across her screen in the odd moments when the keyboard is dormant. Her mum, says an appalled Georgia, doesn’t have any pictures of her and her teenage friends. (Chandler, 2007: 6).

The modern teenage girl’s obsession with taking photographs of herself, with or without friends, is evident on their MySpace pages. The aspect of this that comes into play  regarding self presentation is their selection of the photos that make it to her profile, in contrast to the ones that stay unpublished on her computer, and further contrasted from the ones that were deleted as soon as they were taken. No teenage girl is going to share photos of herself with others that show her in a ‘bad’ light, or do not align with the impression of herself she is trying to give others. This often results in girls taking what is known as a ‘MySpace Angle’ photo. Examples of profiles with these can be seen here, here and here. (links coming soon!) The following video explains what a MySpace angle is about, and some of the different types.

This video highlights what can happen when ‘misleading’ photos are posted on MySpace, and, as also highlighted in Sessions’ article (2009), how the use of MySpace angles is often criticised, yet they are still widely used. This issue of deceptive self presentation online can be linked to Goffman’s discussion of audiences, and how performances can be discredited if someone views a performance that was not meant for them, or if they happen to view backstage work. 

The issue of audience on MySpace can impact on how girls arrange their online presentation of their ‘self’. They must take into consideration both the desire and ability to present themselves however they like on MySpace, and also the fact that a majority of the people who will be viewing their profile know them offline also. All of these social environment factors play a part in how teenage girls construct their identities online.

Next week, I will be examining how these same social factors play a role in the fluid nature of online identities in relation to Zygmunt Bauman’s work on liquid modernity. :)

References:
boyd, d (2007), 'Why Youth [heart] Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life', MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chandler, J (2007), 'The Virtual Generation', The Age, 14 August, 2007, accessed on 13/9/09.

Goffman, E (1991), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin: London.

Pearson, E (2009), 'All the World Wide Web's a stage: The performance of identity in online social networks', First Monday, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2 March 2009.

Sessions, L (2009), '"You looked better on MySpace" Deception and authenticity on Web 2.0', First Monday, Vol. 14, No. 7, 6 July 2009.