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Life is a performance, Twitter is just another stage

In the NY Times Magazine this week:

The Way We Live Now – I Tweet, Therefore I Am

Back in the 1950s, the sociologist Erving Goffman famously argued that all of life is performance: we act out a role in every interaction, adapting it based on the nature of the relationship or context at hand.

When I was a little kid we’d drive to visit relatives, most of whom were conveniently placed almost exactly an hour’s drive away.

In the backseat, in my own head, I would star in my own reality show. Of course the genre hadn’t been invented yet, but I was a fan of The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family… and so I’d sit back there and imagine that I was being watched by millions of adoring fans. Or rather, the narrative I was creating in my head, that occasionally spilled out into reality, was being watched and followed.

I suppose that part of my personality is what helped me slip into Twitter so easily, and before that blogging, message boards, email lists… it feels like second nature to share pieces of my life with virtual strangers.

I switch easily between being in my head and being on the outside looking back. What might interest my “audience” about this instant in my life, if anything? If there’s something there, it often becomes a Tweet, or a Facebook update.

This part is interesting, referring to MIT professor Sherry Turkle and her research:

Among young people especially she found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion. “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” she explained. “But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance…”

I think this idea of a “manufactured self” isn’t new. We build our personas around the way we want other people to see us. For better or worse, we choose our clothes, our music, our passions, even our friends based on how they will be perceived by others.

This isn’t necessarily correspondent to being online. The stage may have changed, and certainly the sheer quantity of potential influencers has changed, but it’s always been a “performance.”