technoculture314-09

Although we express ourselves very differently through new media than we do in person, the reasons why we express ourselves in particular ways are not as fluid as one might think. In 1969 Erving Goffman studied self-identity and representations of the self in society. I found that his theories were very similar to some of the points Luke raised in his lecture, and even that his performance theories were similar to those of Sherry Turkle (writing in 1995 about identity performance on the internet). For example, Goffman writes that identity is "a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited" (245).

So identity is performed daily and is constantly changing and evolving based on life experiences; everything that happens to you shapes who you are. The way you express that person you have become is a performance for the sake of conveying information about your personality. The last part I took to mean that our crucial concern is whether other people will find us authentic or not. If how we present ourselves is constant acts of performance, as Goffman argued in 1969, then how we conduct ourselves on the internet and our concern for acceptance, and being recognised as authentic, is not solely an aspect of new media but an aspect of human nature. How we express ourselves on the internet is obviously a new and different way to represent aspects of our identity. But why we act in these ways, and our concerns about other people's perceptions of us are fundamentally the same as ever.

Liu (2008) identifies four types of taste performance in SNS: prestige, differentiation, authenticity, and theatrical performance. While I agree, I don't believe that these 'taste performances' are restricted only to SNS - I think they are an integral part of human identity performance, acted out in new media, in face-to-face contact, and even in for example letters written on paper one could find all of these aspects. For another of my papers we studied life writing letters by authors in the 19th century, and the ones that spring to mind right now were definitely coded by these 'taste performances'.

One of Sherry Turkle's (1995) main areas of theory is about the fragmented identity and the multiple aspects of self. In her chapter "Aspects of the Self" she writes how one woman is nervous about meeting a man she met online in 'real life', because she exaggerates aspects of herself on the screen, and another woman says that she has 3 different IRC identities (does anybody remember IRC? I was on IRC when I was about 12. I don't even know if it still exists. Anyway it was a really basic chat mode website). So both of these women still felt like 'themselves' on the internet, but they promoted / performed different aspects of themselves according to who they were virtually surrounded with. That sounds a lot like society in 'real life' to me, as well as in 'virtual reality'. I think that the theories of Goffman, Turkle, and Liu can be applied to both 'realities'.