Performing the Self

I never found time to write last week's blog, mostly because of the demands requiring my actual physical presence (with no virtual connectivity) at nightly dress rehearsals for the community theatre play that I have been co-directing. Seeing Stars in Dixie opened last weekend at the Legion Theatre in Cartersville, a Pumphouse Players production--and I am very proud of the quality of the show and of the onstage world we created with a rich cast of characters. We have final performances tonight and tomorrow night. I've been co-director, set designer, propmaster, and stage manager.

Creating a fictional world onstage--and developing interesting, memorable characters--is not so different from creating identities and virtual worlds online. The physicality is missing online, definitely--but there are many similarities. My Digital Culture class and I have been reading Sherry Turkle's Alone Together and discussing the issues that Turkle raises about the construction of identities in cyberspace.

In discussing the roles that digital users inhabit when they create avatars to play games such as Second Life, Turkle says, "Life on the screen becomes an identity workshop. Online worlds and role-playing games ask you to construct, edit, and perform a self.... Our lives on the screen may be play, but they are serious play"(p. 212).

But this play-acting of our selves is not limited to just role-playing games such as Second Life. It is equally as true in social media contexts where we construct profiles to represent the selves we desire to display to a particular online audience.

In constructing our Facebook profile, our LinkedIn profile (like the old school equivalent, the resume), or our online dating profile, each of us carefully selects and arranges an array of semiotically coded words, images, and "likes" (hobbies, movies, TV shows, favorite activities) to communicate to others the "me" that each of us would like them to see.

"What will they think of me if I say I watch this kind of television show?" we ask ourselves. "Wouldn't I appear to be [choose one: cooler, more attractive, more appealing, more mainstream] if I say that I like to listen to this type of music? Like the old personal ads that appeared in print publications, online profiles today are heavily coded with strategically-chosen characteristics that we hope will make our "selves" more presentable.

We often buy into the stereotypical judgments and expectations, and frequently become just as cliche as the old-style personal ads seeking someone to "share life's golden moments" or "take long walks on the beach."













During my exploration of online dating sites a decade ago, looking at Southern (Atlanta area), middle-aged (40s and 50s) men's and women's profiles, I was amazed at how many women said they were "equally as comfortable in evening gowns or blue jeans" and how many men made note of their love of NASCAR and of working out at the gym five times a week. An examination of online dating profiles shows how carefully and strategically they are constructed to convey a desirable side of one's personality--what is hidden from the profile is equally as important as what one has chosen to expose. It's not that people are necessarily being deceptive (though the stories of those who are deceptive get a lot of press)--we are merely well-socialized to conform to a socially-accepted image of who we should be, on the one hand, and we naturally (well, culturally) want to highlight the facets of our selves that we think are most interesting and attractive.

The work of Erving Goffman in the 1950s and 1960s, notably his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, provides us with an approach to thinking about this dramaturgical aspect of our real, physical lives as well as our online lives.

To what degree do we calculate the way we are presenting ourselves--the way we dress, the way we speak, our body language--in a given social situation so that we can maximize our positive impact and impression on those we wish to impress? Similarly, modern-day scademic studies of self presentation are flourishing--a quick search turned up articles such as (Mis)representing the Self in Online Dating, Self-presentation and Deception in Online Dating, Managing Impressions Online, and Self-presentation in Online Personals.

But one fascinating aspect of this issue, raised by Turkle, is about how we use these constructions of our selves--whether game avatars or online profiles--to rehearse inhabiting a character that we might want to be. Is what we might call "play-acting" necessarily a negative behavior? Are we developing self-realization by playing out these different sides of ourselves, expanding our repertoires, becoming more multi-faceted? Are these role-playing activities valuable (and perhaps necessary) to our personal growth and development?