How much can you tell about a person based on one or two interactions? The person can, of course, disclose you their beliefs, interests and daily life, but unless you possess some Sherlockian insight, you will only see part of who they are. This goes both ways – you, too, project only some aspects of yourself.
Depending on who we are socializing with, we act as friends, family, employees or customers. Our parents know a different side of us than our friends or our co-workers do: what information about ourselves we divulge depends on the audience, and we may also talk differently, for example, avoiding certain words, expressions or even accents.
Interaction is guided by who we are talking to as well as by what we want out of the situation. To meet our goal, we take up positions, temporary and contextual roles that apply only in that moment. When somebody asks us for advice, we become an expert. If we witness wrongdoing, we might become a guard or a judge. If the situation calls for it, we might emphasize (or try to downplay) our age, gender or education to be perceived in a certain way. These are subconscious decisions on our part and may be received by the subconscious of the people we are talking to and they can be traced in our body language, the way we speak, the words we choose and the way we narrate stories about our lives. In the 1960s, influential sociologist Erving Goffman, drawing on the concept of face as social standing in Chinese culture, argued that interaction is a performance and we put on faces as if taking up roles in a play. To protect our face and to be seen the way we want to be seen, we adapt to the norms and expectations that feel appropriate given the situation and the people involved.
Because we let different audiences witness different sides of ourselves, situations with multiple audiences can cause social tensions. Have you ever wanted to post something for your friends to see on social media, but then decided against it because you also have followers who might interpret your post the wrong way? Even people who are not regularly active on social media might have a list of followers that includes both close friends, distant acquaintances, co-workers, and family. When different audiences, or “contexts”, are brought together into one situation, the contexts “collapse” into one, and we may be conflicted in which “self” to project. Therefore, context collapse, a term coined by sociotechnological researcher danah boyd, often results in picking a specific “ideal reader” or target audience.
The target audience does not necessarily match the actual audience, though, which is why unprofessional posts on publicly available social media channels could cost you a job offer from any company that googles its applicants (or it could cost you your actual job as evidenced by the list of outrages and so-called cancellations). Privacy settings on social media might allow us to share what we want with who we want.
On the other hand, the target audience and careful management of people’s faces on social media is but another reminder that what we see and read on someone’s profile is curated with a certain purpose in mind. Even a person who isn’t a celebrity or wannabe influencer has certain hopes for how they are perceived. Maybe their photos make them look glamorous and successful, maybe playful and excitable, maybe down-to-earth and relatable. Still, we don’t necessarily know for sure that this matches what they are doing and experiencing offline and what face they project to their closest friends and family.
Interaction is always guided by what we want and who we think we are talking (or writing) to. This happens offline and online alike, we just have different clues to go by. The person who dresses up for their offline job is not necessarily actually “posh”. The person writing intimidatingly eloquent prose for the thesis seminar could be a down-to-earth average student who is just highly successful at emulating the norms of academic writing. When we send in that job application, our cover letter is us “roleplaying” as the perfect candidate. As creepy as it may sound, it can be useful to remember that, to a certain extent, we’re all just putting on performances. Online but also offline.
Bibliography:
boyd, danah (2008). Taken out of context: American teen sociality in networked publics. PhD Dissertation, University of California Berkeley.
Davies, Bronwyn & Harré, Rom (1990). Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20, 43-63.
Goffman, Erving (1967). On Face-Work. An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction. In: Interaction Ritual. New York: Doubleday. 5-45
Marwick, Alice E., & boyd, danah. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New media & society, 13(1), 114-133.