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Bernie Hogan
The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online
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The Presentation of Self in the
Age of Social Media: Distinguishing
Performances and Exhibitions Online
Bernie Hogan1
Abstract
Presentation of self (via Goffman) is becoming increasingly popular as a means for explaining differences in meaning and
activity of online participation. This article argues that self-presentation can be split into performances, which take place in
synchronous “situations,” and artifacts, which take place in asynchronous “exhibitions.” Goffman’s dramaturgical approach
(including the notions of front and back stage) focuses on situations. Social media, on the other hand, frequently employs
exhibitions, such as lists of status updates and sets of photos, alongside situational activities, such as chatting. A key difference
in exhibitions is the virtual “curator” that manages and redistributes this digital content. This article introduces the exhibitional
approach and the curator and suggests ways in which this approach can extend present work concerning online presentation
of self. It introduces a theory of “lowest common denominator” culture employing the exhibitional approach.
Keywords
Goffman, online identity, performance, exhibition, privacy, symbolic interactionism
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely
players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one
man in his time plays many parts.
—Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7
There is a distinct irony in Shakespeare’s claim, as spoken
by Jacques in As You Like It. Shakespeare is not remembered
for his charisma, his looks, or his wit at parties but for his
voluminous plays and sonnets. The world is not only a stage
but also a library and a gallery. We do not merely move through
life’s stages, as Jacques’s monologue suggests, but leave a
multitude of data traces as we go. In an era of social media,
these data traces do not merely document our passage in life’s
play but mediate our parts. We can interact with the data left
by others alongside direct interactions with people themselves.
The world, then, is not merely a stage but also a participatory
exhibit.
The goal of this article is to clarify the ontological (rather
than emic or phenomenological) distinction between actor
and artifact. The actor performs in real time for an audience
that monitors the actor. The artifact is the result of a past
performance and lives on for others to view on their time. In
making this distinction, I contend it is possible to extend
current theories of online interaction and answer existing
research questions such as: Why is it that contexts have “collapsed”
online, as boyd suggests? Why is it so hard to nail
down the notion of a friend online? How tightly can we
couple the identity of an individual online and the activities
of that individual? Addressing these questions entails a
distinction between the sorts of online spaces where actors
behave with each other (“performance” spaces, or behavior
regions; Goffman, 1959) and “exhibition” spaces where individuals
submit artifacts to show to each other. Clarifying this
distinction creates an expanded theoretical repertoire for
scholars, thereby enabling them to disentangle processes
occurring when actors are copresent (in time, if not in the
same geographic place) and processes that occur when actors
are not necessarily present at the same time but still react to
each other’s data.
An exhibition is still a form of presentation of self. One
can find off-line personal exhibitions in the presentation of
photos in someone’s house. Indeed, Halle (1996) indicates
how class clearly differentiates the choice of artwork (or lack
thereof) on display in living rooms. This is to say that people
take their choice of what to display personally and consider
it a form of impression management.
This distinction between performance and exhibition
should be useful to scholars who are interested in the presentation
of self online, and those who, like this author, consider
notions of impression management a useful theoretical foil
1
Oxford University, Oxford, UK
Corresponding Author:
Bernie Hogan, Oxford University, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS, UK
Email: bernie.hogan@oii.ox.ac.uk
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378 Bulletin of Science,Technology & Society 30(6)
for understanding online behavior (boyd, 2007; Marwick
& boyd, in press; Mendelson & Papacharissi, 2010; Lewis,
Kaufman, & Christakis, 2008; Quan-Haase & Collins, 2008;
Schroeder, 2002; Tufekci, 2008).
I begin this article with a review of Goffman’s dramaturgical
approach and its extensive use within social media
studies. I then introduce the exhibitional approach, paying
particular attention to the “curator,” a key role generally absent
from everyday life situations. In the penultimate section, I cover
two areas of concern on social network sites (friend lists and
collapsed contexts), where shifting the focus toward exhibitions
may reveal new insights and facilitate future research
agendas.
Goffman’s Dramaturgy
Goffman’s dramaturgical approach is a metaphorical technique
used to explain how an individual presents an “idealized”
rather than authentic version of herself. The metaphor
considers life as a stage for activity. Individuals thus engage
in performances, which Goffman (1959) defines as “activity
of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his
continuous presence before a particular set of observers and
which has some influence on the observers” (p. 22). This
continued presence allows individuals to tweak their behavior
and selectively give and give off details, a process he
termed “impression management.”
One core assumption of the dramaturgical approach is
that activity takes place in specific bounded settings. To
explain this Goffman draws on Roger Barker’s (1968) notion
of the “behavior setting”. In reacting to the behaviorism the
early 20th century (Skinner, 1939; Watson, 1913), Barker
(1968) suggested most behavior was not determined by
individual-specific stimulus-response patterns but was instead
guided by the norms and goals of specific settings. Goffman
(1959) distilled these specific settings into the well-worn
dichotomy of the “front region” and the “back region,” or
more colloquially, the “front stage” and the “back stage.” In
the front stage, we are trying to present an idealized version
of the self according to a specific role: to be an appropriate
server, lecturer, audience member, and so forth. The backstage,
as Goffman says, is “a place, relative to a given performance,
where the impression fostered by the performance is
knowingly contradicted as a matter of course” (p. 112). In
the backstage, we do much of the real work necessary to keep
up appearances.
What is key for this article is to highlight how situations
are bounded in space and time. According to Goffman
(1959),
[W]hen a performance is given it is usually given in
a highly bounded region, to which boundaries with
respect to time are often added. The impression and
understanding fostered by the performance will tend to
saturate the region and the time span, so that any individual
located in this space-time manifold will be in a
position to observe the performance and be guided by
the definition of this situation which the performance
fosters. (p. 106)
This quote parallels Barker key qualities of a behavior setting
(adapted from Heft, 2001, pp. 253-254):
Specifiable geographical location
Temporal boundaries
Boundaries are perceptible
Behavior settings exist independently of any single
person’s experience of them
Considering these qualities of the situation, Goffman’s
(1959) dramaturgical approach is quite apt. Much like a
stage play (rather than the script), it is bounded in space
and time, and represents the instantiation of specific roles.
Players seek to perform their role as convincingly as possible,
and for the show to succeed there is much work that must
take place behind the scenes. That these regions are bounded
in time is implicit in how Goffman discusses shifts in
performances:
By proper scheduling of one’s performances, it is possible
not only to keep one’s audiences separated from
each other (by appearing before them in different front
regions or sequentially in the same region) but also to
allow a few moments in between performances so as to
extricate oneself psychologically and physically from
one personal front, while taking on another. (p. 138)
The Audience
Within the dramaturgical approach, the audience refers those
who observe a specific actor and monitor her performance.
More succinctly, these are those for whom one “puts on a
front.” This front consists of the selective details that one
presents in order to foster the desired impression alongside
the unintentional details that are given off as part of the performance.
Underlying this notion is the idea that the audience
makes a single coherent demand on the individual. The
above quote (“By proper scheduling . . . ”) reminds us that
Goffman not only considers different regions as bounded in
space-time, but that the audiences are bounded as well. That
is to say, there is usually one specific front that needs to be
presented in any given situation, because each region is not
just a space-time locus, but a time-space-identity locus inhabited
by a specific audience. Thus, it does not matter if the
waiter knows his customers personally, so much that the
waiter puts on that specific front to the customers. Moreover,
a front involves the continual adjustment of self-presentation
based on the presence of others. Goffman (1961) reinforces
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Hogan 379
this idea in Encounters, by discussing unfocused and focused
interactions. Focused interaction “occurs when people effectively
agree to sustain for a time a single focus of cognitive
and visual attention” (p. 7). But even in unfocused interaction
such as “when two strangers across the room from each
other . . . [each] modifies his own demeanor because he himself
is under observation” (p. 7). The key point here is that
individuals put on specific fronts and modify said fronts
because of the sustained observation of an audience.
Goffman also notes that conflict can arise when fronts collide.
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman
(1959) discusses the civil inattention that takes place when
someone answers a telephone in front of others, or when conversations
in public are loud enough to be heard by a third
party. Similarly, Ling (2008) discusses the problem associated
with the “dual-front” that emerges from the cell phone.
He notes how an office phone that is tethered to the place of
work represents the individual in that place, and is part of
the rituals that constitute the office. In contrast, the cell phone
connects people in many situations including ones where
there is substantial mismatch between the two fronts (such as
the high-powered business deal that gets done at the otherwise
languid airport terminal).
Goffman as Applied to Online Media
Goffman might not consider himself a media scholar, although
Lemert (1997) makes the case that Goffman is a product of
the televisual age. And to the extent that he does, it might be
more for Frame Analysis (Goffman, 1974) than for The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman, 1959). Nevertheless,
Goffman’s dramaturgical approach is frequently
considered a useful foil for understanding online presentation
of self. The following list contains some of the many
articles that use Goffman to this end:
Donath (1998) employed Goffman as a starting point
for signaling theory.
Schroeder (2002) uses Goffman’s dramaturgy quite
literally in his analysis of virtual worlds.
boyd (2004, 2006, 2007) used Goffman to ground
SNS activity as networked identity performance.
Hewitt and Forte (2006) use Goffman to explain
identity production on Facebook and conflict because
of the use of multiple fronts.
Robinson (2007) argues for the effectiveness of
Goffman’s approach over postmodern perspectives
found in Turkle (1997).
Lewis, Kaufman, and Christakis (2008) draw on
Goffman’s front stage/back stage distinction for
deriving research questions about privacy.
Tufekci (2008) builds her research on Facebook
presentation around Goffman alongside Dunbar’s
social brain hypothesis.
Quan-Haase and Collins (2008) use impression
management to discuss the art of creating status
messages that signal availability.
Menchik and Tian (2008) use Goffman and symbolic
interactionism more broadly to interpret “facesaving”
on e-mail mailing lists.
Mendelson and Papacharissi (2010) demonstrate
that pictures on social network sites conform to traditional
notions of impression management.
A common thread running through these articles is that
individuals would employ impression management (or the
selective disclosure of personal details designed to present an
idealized self). However, several articles draw more explicitly
on the dramaturgical approach to suggest that sites based on
access control are inherently private, and therefore, a “back
stage” (boyd, 2006; Lewis et al., 2008; Robinson, 2007).
The notion that media provide a window into the private
lives of others (or into things they would not normally show
in public) is not specific to social media. This idea was used
by Meyrowitz (1986) to explain some of the cultural impacts
of television. He asserts that television exists in a private
space and shows private lives: “through electronic media,
groups lose exclusive access to aspects of their own back
region, and they gain views of the back regions of other
groups” (Meyrowitz, 1986, p. 135). Children get to view the
typical adult world of their parents, men and women are now
privy to conversations that would normally be segregated,
and idols are brought down to earth through tabloid journalism.
It is from here we can see the genesis of boyd’s “collapsed
contexts” (2007), as well as concerns about impression
management vis-à-vis tabloid journalism and television’s
focus on scandal.
Backstage Is Not Private Space
I consider two issues emerging from this model: the conflation
of the backstage with private spaces and the conflation
of presentation of self with performance.
Several researchers have used the idea that Facebook is a
backstage (Lewis et al., 2008; Tufekci, 2008) in order to
motivate questions about privacy. However, the idea that
some information is to be withheld from people is not the
same thing as saying this information was part of what went
into the creation of a front or that it contradicts a front as
matter of course. From Goffman’s definition, anywhere can
be a back stage to another front stage. Academics working in
their office present a front to the colleagues at their department
by showing studiousness and perhaps not surfing the
net. However, this front may also involve long periods of
deliberation on a piece of work that is hidden from another
front: the audience at a conference.
Online, the notion of a backstage fails to capture the role
of a third party in regulating who has access to information
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380 Bulletin of Science,Technology & Society 30(6)
about an individual. That Facebook allows only friends or
“friends of friends” to see specific content does not suggest
that this content signifies a backstage to other possible content
that is available for anyone to see. To expect privacy
online is not to imply that one has something worth hiding or
a presentation that may contradict one’s role in other spheres
of life. Rather, it signifies that some individuals are classified
as being considered contextually appropriate for this specific
information (Nissenbaum, 2004). It further suggests
that there is a third party (Facebook’s servers) that knows who
is considered an appropriate audience member for this content
and who is not.
Lewis et al. (2008) used the notion of the backstage when
comparing cultural information displayed by individuals
with private and public accounts. They discovered that those
with public accounts actually display more obscure music
tastes. They loosely connected this to the notion of the backstage
and suggest that some individuals draw open the stage’s
curtain to let the world see their tastes. To make their metaphor
successful, they imply that music tastes are something
inherently private and something that go into the creation of
a front stage. However, it is more likely that showing music
tastes is appropriate to the context of Facebook. Musical
tastes are not a backstage but rather are a front. Some people
carefully select which tastes to show, and thus, give a clear
reason to make their profile less private. It is not that others
with a narrower range of music want to hide their musical
tastes but that they are indifferent to the association of taste
and identity.
Artifacts Are Representations Not Performances
Beyond the issue of the back stage and privacy is a deeper
issue about whether online content can be considered a performance
in the first place. The conflation of performance
and online profile is likely because of the notion that because
a blog or profile signifies a single individual it does not merely
stand in for that individual but is that individual (Reed, 2005).
Similarly, Robinson (2007) coins the term cyberperformersto
denote individuals who perform in cyberspace. In doing so,
she equates the behavior of individuals in chat rooms and
instant messengers (who either interact in real time or with
specific known recipients) with the behavior of Flickr.com
photo submitters and bloggers.
Can all content be considered a performance? To address
this issue, it is useful to distinguish between performance as
ephemeral act and performance as recorded act. Once a performance
has been recorded, the nature of the performance
has altered. It may still be a presentation of self, and undoubtedly
it continues to signify an individual. However, it no
longer necessarily bounds the specific audience who were
present when the performance took place. Instead, it can be
taken out of a situation and replayed in a completely different
context. For example, a concert video may bring back
great memories of a summertime show, but it does not transport
the band to the viewer’s living room.
The distinction between ephemeral act and recorded has
an instructive parallel in the domain of art. In The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin (1967)
considers the functions of art in a time when process and
reproduction make most artwork easily accessible to the
masses. He asserts that these reproductions lack the unique
“aura” of the original object. This aura is not a transcendental
force but simply the unique historical trajectory of a singular
object. This distinction between unique artwork with
its aura and mechanical reproductions designed to signify the
original parallels the distinction between singular individual,
with one’s own mind and presence, and digital traces designed
to signify the individual.
Benjamin (1967) notes several consequences of this shift
away from an emphasis on the aura of objects that also have
a relevant parallel. First, in being reproduced, the reception
of art becomes less something to be revered in a unique situation
and more something to be consumed alongside other work:
In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its
exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation
with entirely new functions, among which the one we
are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized
as incidental. (p. 225)
Benjamin also suggests that individuals should be dissociated
from their reproductions. All historically unique objects
(including people) have an aura. He suggests that film is what
separates the person from their aura:
[F]or the first time-and this is the effect of film—man
has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing
its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can
be no replica of it. (p. 229)
Third, he presages the difference between immediate
impression management and the context-collapsing artifacts
online. He does this by considering the fixed gaze of the
camera:
The film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor
to adjust to the audience during his performance, since
he does not present his performance to the audience in
person . . . The audience’s identification with the actor
is really an identification with the camera. (p. 228)
Thus, embedded in Benjamin’s (1967) thesis about artwork
is a relevant distinction between the individual and the
representation of the individual. Benjamin, as well as those
writing in his wake tended to focus on the consequences of
art and film (cf. Hansen, 1987). However, there is nothing in his
thesis that prevents us from importing these ideas into everyday
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Hogan 381
life—now that everyday life is replete with reproductions of
the self. To link this notion more explicitly to Goffmanian
impression management, I offer below an explication of
exhibition sites.
Exhibitional Approach Introduced
An exhibition site can now be defined as a site (typically
online) where people submit reproducible artifacts (read:
data). These artifacts are held in storehouses (databases).
Curators (algorithms designed by site maintainers) selectively
bring artifacts out of storage for particular audiences.
The audience in these spaces consists of those who have
and those who make use of access to the artifacts. This
includes those who respond, those who lurk, and those who
acknowledge or are likely to acknowledge.
Scope
In contrast to situations, many social media sites do not
depend on being bounded in space and time with continued
observation occurring between individuals. Instead they have
the following features, which I consider sufficient components
of an exhibition space:
1. Information signifying an individual is delivered to
the audience, on demand by a third party.
2. Because of the reproducibility of content and the
fact that it is sent to a third party for distribution, the
submitter does not continually monitor these data as
an audience is receiving it, and may possibly never
fully know the audience.
Sites such as Facebook.com, Flickr.com, and YouTube.
com have these qualities, as do the talk pages on Wikipedia.
org (where content is associated with contributors). Wikipedia
article pages would not be considered exhibition sites since
the article is not designed to signify the specific individuals
who wrote the article. Blogs generally fulfill these criteria
but online gaming sites would not. That is to say, these
criteria are most closely associated with what we presently
consider social media or social network sites (boyd & Ellison,
2007).
The first and fundamental criterion draws a line between
that which requires the present in order to be understood and
that which makes no such demand. Virtual worlds and most
online gaming (particular first-person shooters and MMORPGs)
take place in the present. A user’s actions are not simply
placed in a sequence (such as reply-to), but are understood
through mutual reactions where the timing of each action is
relevant. Although individuals are not copresent in space,
they are still monitoring and reacting to each other. The context
of the game or the social world stands in for the context
of a specific setting (Schroeder, 2002). In contrast, exhibition
spaces require a third party to store data for later interaction;
real-time interaction can take place, but it is not necessary.
This is clearly unlike a “situation” as is noted by the aforementioned
quotes from Goffman.
The second criterion draws a line between that which is
addressed and that which is submitted. Some content is
addressed to a particular person or some particular people.
E-mail and instant messaging are examples of addressed
media. Each message denotes a specific sender and a specific
set of recipients. This is much like a situation where people
are addressing specific alters or a specific audience. It is not
necessarily in real time, but one can still put up a front intended
for a specific set of recipients, and monitor activity in a direct
reply. In exhibition spaces content is submitted to a data
repository; people post status updates to Facebook, upload
pictures to Picasa.com or Flickr.com and post articles to a
blog. This latter content may be produced and submitted
with a specific audience in mind, but those who view and
react to this content may be different from those for whom it
was intended (if it was intended for anyone in particular to
begin with).
These criteria do not preclude the use of an exhibitional
approach in other domains but to suggest spaces where it is
most appropriate: blog posts, photo galleries, and status updates.
These are places where content is submitted to a third party,
available to a large and potentially unknowable audience and
tethered to a specific submitter. The extension of the exhibitional
approach to other spaces (and to hybrid spaces such as
Google Wave) is beyond the scope of this article.
The Curator
Unique historical artifacts have typically been curated by
experts. These people select which artworks to display, where
to place them, and what narrative to tell about this selection.
With a shift from presence (and aura) to data and reproduction,
it is now possible for information signifying someone
to be endlessly copied and reconfigured. Everyone can have
his or her own exhibit, as long as the relevant information can
be displayed with some coherence. Yet it is simply impractical
to have a human curator pore over one’s social information
and devise a unique and relevant exhibit for each person,
on demand. Consequently, computers have taken on this
role, devising continually more sophisticated ways to curate
artifacts.1
Curators mediate our experience of social information.
Good curation presents things to the user that the user finds
relevant or interesting. Bad curation is either overwhelming
or unexpectedly irrelevant. Curators facilitate the following
functions, which are available online and generally not a part
of performances and situations: filtering, ordering, and searching.
These functions are based on the fact that storehouses
keep more artifacts than are generally on display. As such, it is
necessary to limit the artifacts in some meaningful way.
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382 Bulletin of Science,Technology & Society 30(6)
Filtering artifacts simply limits which artifacts are on display.
This can be done based on qualities of the artifacts or
qualities of the relationship between an individual and the
artifacts. For example, one might want to view only tweets
that mention a specific topic. If the tweet is public and mentions
the topic, it is included in the set of things to be displayed.
If it is private, then the curator determines access to
this tweet. If I am following someone’s private account, then
I can view these tweets.
Filtering performances is not something that can be done
in a situation. Granted, one can choose to ignore a performance
or specific aspects of it. People may choose to censor
a humorous story for a specific group. But selectivity in a
situation is not the same as filtering. Performers censor,
curators filter on behalf of the audience. We can “tune in” or
“tune out” performances, but filtering implies that one can
evaluate a set of things before they are presented for consumption.
Curators can do this because they retrieve things
from a storehouse and put them on display.
Artifacts are also ordered in some way. Depending on the
task, there is often a meaningful ordering. Communication is
usually presented in reverse chronological order. Items for
sale are frequently ordered according to price. More sophisticated
algorithms can order items by relevance. For example,
Facebook will select potential friends for the user from
the larger set of friends. These potential friends will be ordered
using a black box statistical metric seemingly related to the
individuals one is likely to know. Amazon orders potential
products based on their perceived relevance, which is a rank
order based on a statistical measure of similarity. Lists of
names are often sorted alphabetically.
Again, ordering is not something that can be done in a
performance. That is not to say things in situations do not
have a sequence. It is to say that performances in situations
cannot be “reordered” as convenient. The order of online
artifacts is based on the fact that each artifact is part of a set
of similar artifacts that are known ahead of time. Performances
have sequence but because they take place in “real
time” or have a specific space-time locus they cannot be
resorted at will.
Finally, artifacts online can be searched. Searching is
simply filtering (and ordering) based on user input. Curators
often work passively, as when people view their RSS readers,
their Twitter queues or their Facebook news feeds. However,
sometimes filtering and ordering is done on content
that includes specific requests from a user. Simply by viewing
online content one is subject to filtering and ordering.
Searching requires the user to submit additional information
to fine-tune the display of content.
The role of the curator is to manage the preexisting content
on behalf of the submitters. Within this space, it is more
relevant to ask about the access controls that the curator put
in place than whether or not this space is private. We may
ask about the consequence of a specific ordering of data and
whether this ordering is effective. We may also ask what is
hidden from the users as a result of filtering, or what data are
available for users to reorder. For example, can one reorder
friends based on the number of mutual ties? Can one restrict
access to content to a specific group of friends (i.e., impose a
filter based on specific audience members)? How clearly do
individuals understand different groups of friends on a given
site? How easy is it to move content from one site to another?
Limits of the Exhibitional Approach
The exhibitional approach does not cover all online interaction,
much like the dramaturgical approach does not cover all
off-line interaction. For example, virtual worlds are hybrid
spaces that share aspects of both off-line situations and online
exhibitions. Insofar as there are servers that mediate information
between individuals who are not immediately copresent,
there is some recording involved. But play in social worlds
generally takes place in specific bounded locations at specific
bounded times in the same way that off-line interaction takes
place in situations. One’s avatar is meant to signify her mind
as acting in a virtual context. The avatar interacts directly
with other avatars that appear on the screen within one’s field
of view. It simulates off-line interaction, and consequently
simulates the situation. Thus, it is unsurprising that Goffman
has already been applied to these spaces (Schroeder, 2002).
Examples That Apply
an Exhibitional Approach
In the penultimate section, I illustrate some examples where
an exhibitional approach may illuminate or at least reorient
our interpretations of online spaces.
What Is a Friend Online?
Sharing artifacts online is often done through “friends.” As
such, people add many friends to their online profile in order
to participate in these sites fully. Curators use this list of
friends in order to determine how to properly redistribute
content. This list, however, is not tethered to a situation, but
to an individual, beyond any specific situation. Consequently,
people can add many more friends than would normally be
included in a specific situation. It is not uncommon for students
to have more than 200 friends on a social networking
site (boyd, 2007; Lewis et al., 2008). This is larger than the
number of people one is likely to know personally and feel
close to. Depending on the question asked and method used,
the number of people in the personal network varies from the
low 30s (Hogan, Carrasco, and Wellman, 2007) through
the upper 60s (Boase, Horrigan, Wellman, & Rainie, 2006;
McCarty, Bernard, Killworth, Shelley, & Johnsen, 1997) to
upwards of 150 (Roberts, Dunbar, Pollet, & Kuppens, 2008),
but rarely if ever above that.
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Hogan 383
The irony of this situation is that only 10 years ago, sociologists
and those in related fields were actively assessing
whether online interaction was isolating people (Kraut,
Lundmark, Kiesler, Mukopadhyay, & Scherlis, 1998; Nie,
Hillygus, & Erbring, 2002). Yet in 2009, the most recent
OxIS report in Britain notes ex-users and nonusers of the
Internet report twice as much of a sense of loneliness as
Internet users (Dutton, Helsper, and Gerber, 2009). At the
same time, people online are complaining the need to manage
overwhelming lists of friends (Acquisti & Gross, 2006;
Hewitt & Forte, 2006). This is unsurprising as there cognitive
limits to the number of people one can actively maintain
in a personal network (Dunbar, 1998).
If we consider online friends not as a means for signifying
those with whom we have close relations but those with
whom we want to manage access to content, we can refocus
both what a friend means online and how to manage the
surging lists of friends on many social network sites. How
can systems be designed in order to curate more effectively?
How do users classify their friends relative to a classification
that emerges from the traces of interaction on a website?
Gilbert and Karahalios (2009) approach this latter question
by focusing on the ways in which strong ties can be modeled
through passive data, such as time to last message or mutual
friends. This work is oriented toward the ordering of content
that has already been submitted. It is therefore possible to
consider it as a means for fine-tuning the curatorial process.
However, there is still little work on the means for fine-tuning
the submission process. Do strong ties represent a single
group to which one submits content? Or are there different
strong ties within different groups whereby it is more useful
to submit to the group and have group members filter accordingly?
Here I do not provide an answer but reframe the question
so that an answer can more effectively conform to the
reality of what a “friend” is in an exhibition space.
Collapsed Contexts and
the Lowest Common Denominator?
Friends are a form of access control online, and followers are
a form of information management. These metaphors (friend
and follower) do not perfectly correspond to their original
meanings. Nevertheless, they are evidently a useful way to
simplify the process of granting access controls online. If
anything, these metaphors may be too simple. boyd (2006)
lists 13 plausible reasons for befriending someone she
encountered in ethnographic studies with teens. Only one was
being a friend. The remainder focused on popularity, concerns
for access control, and difficulty in saying no. What
has emerged from this underdetermined friend tag is the
accumulation of many social circles of friends under a single
rubric (Hewitt & Forte, 2006). As sites expand to encompass
more individuals from one’s off-line life, with no clear distinction
between them it also collapses all of the partially
overlapping social circles of modern life (Simmel, 1922)
into a single list. Friends may now refer to family members,
coworkers, actual friends, neighbors, acquaintances, high
school friends, people from online hobby groups or gaming
sites, one-night stands, distant friends of friends, students
past or present, and generally any other potentially personal
relationship.
boyd (2007) has referred to the existence of all of these
groups in one space as the “collapsed contexts” quality of
social network sites. For each of these contexts, one might
have a slightly different presentation of self. Yet since they
all have on-demand access to one’s online artifacts, this results
in a decontextualization of any of these artifacts. Artifacts
are not tied to situations but to individual profiles. The individual
therefore comes to represent these same artifacts to all
“friends.” If social network sites house more friends than are
cognitively manageable, all of whom have access to one’s
content, and many of whom represent different social groupings
and different potential fronts, then how do individuals
manage to submit any content at all? Why is there not a sense
of self-presentation paralysis?
The answer is that one need not consider everyone when
submitting content but only two groups: those for whom we
seek to present an idealized front and those who may find
this front problematic. That is, in addition to the traditional
audience of situations, one must add a hidden audience who
are not the intended recipient of content but will have access
to it as well. One might not post for one’s boss on Twitter,
but if one’s boss is following (or is likely to follow), then one
will certainly post in light of the fact that the boss may read
it. One might not be posting for one’s parents (or children or
students) on Facebook, but again, one is posting in light of
the fact that these individuals may have access; these individuals
define the lowest common denominator of what is
normatively acceptable.2
A theory of lowest common denominator culture is more
appropriate to exhibition spaces replete with persistent content
than single context performances. It offers a potential an
explanation for three aspects of social network sites. The
first is why individuals effectively participate in these sites,
halfheartedly join, or even refuse: An individual assesses
whether his identity can be effectively represented by the
lowest common denominator of the people who view his
content in his absence. The second is to explain how in an
age of profound surveillance (both from authorities and
peers), individuals still submit content that is unambiguously
questionable (nudity, violence, political extremism, racial
epithets): The lowest common denominator of niche sites
may be different than that of general sites. As such, one may
have a clean profile on Facebook but a series of lewd pictures
on Xtube.com, Suicidegirls.com, Pornotube.com, and
so forth. Similarly, one may be sexually ambiguous or even
deceptive on Facebook or one’s twitter account, but still have
a openly gay profile on Gaydar.co.uk, Gay.com, Manhunt.com,
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384 Bulletin of Science,Technology & Society 30(6)
and so on. A businessperson may seek to be clean cut and
professional on one site but espouse politically extreme
views on Stormfront.org or Newsaxon.org. In more positive
terms, a teacher may complain about troubling students on
TheApple.Monster.com but make no such claims on Facebook,
where the teacher might be friends with students’ parents
or the students themselves. The third aspect of these
sites that a theory of lowest common denominator addresses
is how exactly individuals interpret this particular context: it
is likely that people do not create sophisticated projections of
their social network, nor need they. Instead, their behavior is
in reference to specific salient individuals, who are small
enough in number to be coherent. The persistence of this
content beyond these salient individuals is rarely accounted
for. This theory is also in keeping with research by Acquisti
and Gross (2006) about why individuals will reveal a great
deal of information on Facebook: they trust the site to curate
it for them appropriately (even though they are often misinformed
about the who can access what), and that they submit
information they feel is inoffensive to some perceived salient
individuals.
Conclusions
Many online sites set up a situation where individuals can continually
submit data to be associated with their profile. This
sort of “interaction” where people view and react to the submitted
content of others is dissimilar from the traditional situations
that gave rise to Goffman’s germane dramaturgical
approach. The impetus for this article was to suggest that many
aspects of Goffman’s approach (e.g., impression management)
can work in a framework that is more aligned to these
spaces, namely through the metaphor of an exhibition rather
than one of a stage play. One of the key distinctions between
exhibitions and performances is that performances are subject
to continual observation and self-monitoring as the means for
impression management, whereas exhibitions are subject to
selective contributions and the role of a third party. I refer to
this third party as a curator that has the capacity to filter, order,
and search content. The exhibition has its own logic, such as
lowest common denominator culture and easy persistent
friends that do not have direct analogs in offline life. Privacy
becomes a matter of how content is aggregated (e.g., Is
it tied to a real name? Is it tied to a geographical location?
How findable is the user and the user’s data?) and how access
control is managed a priori, rather than in situ. I draw on
Benjamin’s classic essay to indicate that the notion of distinguishing
individuals from their reproductions is not a novel
idea. What is novel, however, are its application to everyday
life, and its aggregation through digital means.
Acknowledging the difference between performances
and exhibitions is an ontological matter, not an empirical or
phenomenological one. People need not acknowledge this
mediated relationship in order to participate in it. In fact, it is
likely that ignorance blissfully facilitates the willing capture,
storage, and use of private data. Moreover, it is a difference
that allows individuals to consume and view each other’s
past artifacts without directly engaging the individual, or in
many instances, even letting the profile owner know that
their information is being viewed.
What is empirical in this domain is the extent to which
misunderstandings about the basic ontological structure of
data, its curation, and exhibition give rise to new unintended
problems: social information overload, collapsed contexts,
accidental disclosures, and “identity” theft. What people do
is based on their mental models of these sites, and as past
work has demonstrated, there is often a great mismatch
between the mental models and the actual behaviors (Acquisti
& Gross, 2006). These sites also give rise to new potentials:
heightened social capital from newly accessible weak ties
(Ellison, Steinfeld, & Lampe, 2007); asynchronous and
coordinated grassroots organizing (Earl, 2010); strengthening
of long distance ties through photo sharing and rapid
exchanges (Cook, Teasley, & Ackerman, 2009); otherwise
hidden communities such as gays and lesbians suddenly being
able to find each other rapidly and privately (Gray, 2009).
These new phenomena are not necessarily about the performance
but the new mediated architecture that encapsulates
and redistributes past performances for mutual and often
asynchronous benefits. The capabilities of exhibition sites
allow a person to be found when others want to look rather
than when the person is able to be present and perform.
Thus, extending presentation of self by considering an exhibitional
approach alongside a dramaturgical one is meant
to be a step toward a clearer articulation of both the potentials
and the perils of self-presentation in an age of digital
reproduction.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers along
with danah boyd, Scott Golder, Allison Powell, Ralph Schroeder,
Amaru Villanueva Rance, and the participants of the Oxford Internet
Institute’s 2009 summer doctoral program for their input and
constructive criticism.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the
authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or
authorship of this article.
Notes
1. Interestingly, “digital curation” is now used in the United
Kingdom to refer to the practice of maintaining storehouses
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Hogan 385
of digital research content (see http://www.dcc.ac.uk/). But in
this case, it is still implied that there is an expert individual
who is maintaining the data. This is a different matter, and one
that parallels offline archival. This sort of curation also tends
to work at the level of the data set, much like off-line curation
works with a specific artwork, rather than the level of raw data.
2. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for noting that
lowest common denominator culture is not specific to exhibition
spaces but to collapsed contexts. For example, a wedding
speech might not cater to every single audience member but
simply be inoffensive to salient individuals (e.g., a priest and
one’s mother-in-law) while appealing to friends and certain
relatives. That said, even in the case of a wedding speech, certain
poor jokes can immediately be “recovered” in ways that
artifacts may not.
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Bio
Bernie Hogan is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute
at the University of Oxford. His work focuses on relationships,
social media and social networks. He received his dissertation from
the University of Toronto in 2009.
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