Analysis Of Goffman's Dramaturgy Perspective

In his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman (1959) focuses on the self as a staged production in which people actively present themselves to different audiences one encounters. To bolster his conceptualization, Goffman used an interesting metaphor of “all the world’s a stage” (1959, 254). This, he terms as a “dramaturgical approach” (Goffman 1959, 240) in which an actor puts on a show for others; drawing analogies between human behaviors and the theater. Goffman (1959) likens the individual to an actor on stage performing for and with other individuals involved in the situation. Three types of space exist for the actor to perform on, to enact the self, and to interact with others: the front stage, the backstage, the outer region. Goffman (1959) utilizes specific dramaturgical terms such as performance, teams, front and back regions, sign-vehicles, and highlights the process of dramatic realization. These terms will be discussed in the following sections.

Mike puts on a long sleeve button down shirt and portrays nice manners. Mike is the actor in this video. He is portraying his “front stage self” to Maggie’s parents. When putting on our “front stage selves” we engage in “impression management” this is when we engage in behaviors that we want the audience to see which are often favorable. Maggie’s parents then approve of Mike, and after time goes by Mike begins to portray his “backstage self” such as belching, and showing his tattoos again, that then becomes okay to Maggie’s parents.

Religion is a system of beliefs and practices that bind a community together around the things which it holds sacred (Durkheim, 1995). Religions involve symbols, which invoke feelings of reverence, and may be linked to rituals or ceremonies practiced by a community of believers (Giddens, 1989). Religion is seen as a sociological issue due to the communities it creates, and the influence it has on these communities (Johnstone, 2015). In sociology, various approaches are used in order to consider social phenomena such as religion; one of these is the symbolic interactionist approach largely theorised by George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer. In addition, metaphors are often used in sociological analysis: the well-known ‘society as theatre’ metaphor

Sociologist Erving Goffman developed the concept of dramaturgy which is the idea that life is like a never-ending play in which people are actors. Goffman believed that from the day we are born, we are thrust onto a stage called everyday life and that our socialization consists of learning how to play our assigned “self’s” from other people. He used the imagery of theater to portray the importance of human and social action and interaction through his dramaturgical model of social life. We choose what “self” to act as while interacting with people who are in turn doing the exact thing. He believed that no matter what we do, we are playing out some “self” on the stage of life. The self, according to Goffman, is a sense of who one is; a dramatic

The front stage is part of the individual’s performance to act in a situation for observers or audience to view. These performances provide impressions for the audience and observers to analyze and confirm identities. Fronts are usually pre-established and stereotyped of how performers should act, behave, and interact in a situation. Erving Goffman divides the front stage into two parts: setting and the personal front. The setting is composed of sceneries, props, and location. If you are an office worker or a manager, it is more credible to convince the audience if you have a cubicle or an office. Moreover, settings do alter how the actor performs for different audiences. The personal front is how the audience identifies the actor—racial characteristics,

“You say you want a revolution/ Well, you know/ We all want to change the world/ You tell me that it's evolution/ Well, you know/

When applying Erving Goffman’s theory of dramaturgy to social networking media such as Facebook, it can be observed that people present themselves to others to appear more desirable. People presenting themselves to be more desirable on Facebook can be seen in the artifact of the Catfish Movie- Trailer (Universal Pictures, 2010). While looking at Facebook as a stage in terms of Dramaturgy it can be viewed that impression management, performance, and front and back stage are consciously or unconsciously used by Facebook’s users, which will all be applied in context of Facebook users. Dramaturgy will be applied using Facebook as the stage due to it being the “most dominant social networking platform” (Duggan & Smith, 2013), although Goffman’s Dramaturgy is limited to face-to-face interactions, Dramaturgy can still be observed when looking at Facebook users due to the social interaction between one another. Due to users convenience of being able to monitor what images they put up of themselves, such as pictures, friends, and groups, they are able to seem more desirable to their peers then they may actually be which will be displayed through Catfish and the application of four scholar articles.

The two identifications immediately noticed of an actor are their race and gender performance according to Webb. Western culture has come to view gender as a binary concept with two rigidly fixed physical options which are male or female. With race still in mind, these allow the observer to reference and “view performance as an intrinsically citational act according to the paradigm of repetition with critical difference”(Webb 450). The critical difference lies in the all black cast doing an opera performance that would typically be done by an all white cast. Stein keeps her black performers but masks them in white suits, gloves, and a uniform shade of brown on their faces analogous to black face minstrel performances. Entertainment had continued to be a song and dance routine in minstrelsy creating a trope of blackness in a fashion that were perceived as primitive according to white audiences.

Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr, better known as "The Great Imposer" truly represents what it means to present the self. Presenting the self, also sometimes called impression management management, is the process through which we try to control the impressions people form of us(Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2015). Demara was able to present himself is certain ways to portray a specific image of who he was trying to be.

Besides Gramsci, Marcuse, and Chakrabarty, another person that makes me think about structure and agency is Goffman. According to his dramaturgical analysis, people are all actors and actresses performing on the stage. At the front stage, with the help of props and nonverbal communications, people behave or perform accordingly based on their roles. People put on different masks when they interact with different people, and there are certain elements that they do not want others to see when they are at the back stage (Goffman 1956). For example, a man might be at all the same times a father, a son, a religious devotee, a teacher, a volunteer, an avid rock music fan, a photographer, and a vlogger. At all these different roles, he might present himself differently. He might be a caring and considerate father who enjoys cooking for his family, but at the meantime he might be a very serious teaching who always wears suit and tie and seldom smiles in class. In the meantime, he sings along and dance crazily at a rock music concert, and as a vlogger he always speaks funny on YouTube. On the hand, we can say that all his behaviors are determined by the structure, because the structure or the collective consciousness determines what is appropriate or inappropriate at different settings. On the other hand, his agency jumps in and makes the decisions of whether or not he performs the role in the most socially accepted ways. In fact, while he performs the different roles differently in

Goffman introduces us to the concept of dramaturgy in regards to the development of the social Self (and therefore to Gender Identity). For Goffman, dramaturgy is how the individual becomes a performer in public/quasi-public settings, and their surrounding environment by default become an audience. He focuses on the dynamic between the two, especially on how the performer must manage their impression to win audience approval. To fail at garnishing such approval means risking the entire social setting. (This builds upon, or at least references, Cooley’s Mirror Self in that one turns to others to understand one’s self in a social situation).

Erving Goffman theory of the individual as a performer, Dramaturgy is a conception that our social life a series of performances, that we are acting a role that we pick. Impression management is when in society to present a more favorable aspect of our self we put on a show, we create the image that we want to project of our self. An example is if your boss yells at you for something you believe didn't need all that commotion say you were five minutes late you would not say anything until you were at lunch with your friends, backstage with out the audience judgment is when people truly express themselves. Front stage on the other hand is when you prepare sort of like practicing a role before hand, for example if you were going to a job interview you would rehearse and dress in a way to bring forth your best image.

Impression management is something that happened always, I could notice it just by how individuals acted backstage and front stage; the waiters were happy, energized, and polite when they were interacting with the customers because they must provide a good service, but when they were just waiting for orders they would look tired and angry. Furthermore, face was something that

In the first paragraph of my first article, I will analyze how People use social media to push the borders between what is normally considered proper and improper, Facebook will be analysed in this article based on Erving Goffman’s studies of dramaturgical model of social interaction and finally will study the distinction between both front and back stage in social media. Front stage can be regarded as the part of the space in which the individual is more demonstrative in his or her action in front of their audience; whereas, the backstage is totally hidden from the

Much like the sentiment of a few members of the class, I personally felt that it was more peculiar for someone to go so out of their way to appear in a certain light to other people. After reviewing the additional readings, I didn’t view it so negatively because in many situations it does take a degree of theatrics to make an organization or relationship run smoothly. The impression management techniques are surprisingly prevalent in any organization once they are recognized and, while they seem shallow, it is often necessary to use such techniques to create an environment where goals are accomplished in order and with more efficiency. The example of the teacher and mental institution