Hugh
Miller, Department of Social Sciences, The Nottingham Trent University
Paper
presented at Embodied Knowledge and Virtual Space Conference
Goldsmiths' College, University of London, June 1995
Goffman (1956,1973)
has described how people negotiate and validate identities in face-to-face
encounters and how people establish 'frames' within which to evaluate
the meaning of encounters. These ideas have been influential in how
sociologists and psychologists see person-to-person encounters. Kendon
(1988) gives a useful summary of Goffman's views on social interaction.
Electronic
communication (EC) has established a new range of frames of interaction
with a developing etiquette. Although apparently more limited and
less rich than interactions in which the participants are physically
present, it also provides new problems and new opportunities in the
presentation of self. There have been exciting discussions about the
possible nature of 'electronic selves' (for instance Stone, 1991).
This paper is a basic exploration of how the presentation of self
is actually taking place in a technically limited, but rapidly spreading,
aspect of EC: personal homepages on the World Wide Web.
Between
the 50s and the early 80s, Erving Goffman worked to describe the structure
of face-to-face interaction and to account for how that structure
was involved in the interactive tasks of everyday life. He developed
a series of concepts which are useful in describing and understanding
interaction, and also showed how the physical nature of interaction
settings is involved in people's interactions.
One of
things people need to do in their interactions with others is present
themselves as an acceptable person: one who is entitled to certain
kinds of consideration, who has certain kinds of expertise, who is
morally relatively unblemished, and so on. (Goffman has a whole book
(1964) in which he considers cases where there are particular problems
in making these claims.) People have techniques and resources available
to allow them to do this. 'Backstage' preparation can help in presenting
an effective 'front', 'expressive resources' can be mobilised, and
cooperation from others present in the interaction can often be relied
upon to smooth over jagged places and provide opportunities for redeeming
gaffes. Goffman sees embarrassment as an important indicator of where
people fail to present an acceptable self, and an important motivator.
A person wishes to present themself effectively to minimise the embarrassment
of a failing presentation, but other participants are also motivated
to help the performance by their wish to avoid the embarrassment they
feel at its failure. So, most of the time, we interact in a cosy conspiracy
in which it appears as if everyone knows what they are talking about,
can remember the names of those who they're talking to, and has an
appearance and presence which is pleasant and unexceptionable. In
this sense, our 'selves' are presented for the purpose of interacting
with others, and are developed and maintained with the cooperation
of others through the interaction.
In face-to-face
encounters, much information about the self is communicated in ways
incidental to the 'main business' of the encounter, and some is communicated
involuntarily: Goffman distinguishes between information 'given',
that is, intended and managed in some way, and that 'given off' which
'leaks through' without any intention. He also points out a difference
between the 'main' or 'attended track' of the interaction and other
'unattended tracks' which are at that moment less salient. If a colleague
calls round, I may discuss a work problem and prepare a cup of coffee
simultaneously, both of these going on cooperatively and interactively
with the other person, but it is generally clear that the 'point'
of the interaction is the discussion, not the coffee making.
Much of
Goffman's interest is in his analysis of the depth and richness of
everyday interaction. This depth and richness is perhaps not apparent
in electronic interaction, but the problem of establishing and maintaining
an acceptable self remains, and there is a range of expressive resources
available for this end. As the technology develops, more expressive
resources become available. Also, as the culture of electronic communication
develops, people will construct expressive resources out of whatever
facilities are available. Electronic communication will become more
and more human communication to the extent that there is more to it
than just efficiently passing information to each other.
Before
looking at how the resources electronically available are deployed
to produce impressions of self, it is necessary to establish how electronic
communication differs from face-to-face interaction and to work out
what expressive resources are available. The kinds of electronic communication
I'm discussing here are email and the World Wide Web, though I will
concentrate on the Web.
EC is a
system which is instantaneous but asynchronous, can be one-to-one
but may be one-to-many, one-to-anyone or one-to-no-one. Place and
distance are largely invisible. It can be entirely private with unlisted
email addresses and call screening or entirely promiscuous with homepages.
It could
be argued that EC is not interaction in Goffman's sense at all. Goffman
(1981) gives a series of system requirements for interactions. Some,
like signals that informs senders that reception is taking place,
or signals that announce that a channel is sought for or that a channel
is open, are not present on the Web. None the less, Web pages are
intended to be read by others, often invite comment, can be interactive
in various ways, and almost always have an email address for contact.
I would argue that they are part of an interactive system, although
a pretty restricted one.
This promiscuity
of the Web goes deep. To talk to you face-to-face, I have to travel
to your town, walk up your street, knock on your door, and maybe get
invited into your kitchen. Alternatively I might visit you at work.
Even on the phone, I have to know the appropriate area code and may
have to go through various gatekeepers to talk to you. When we finally
interact, we both know to some extent where we both are and probably
where the other is coming from. We also know what kind of interaction
this is, whether it's a customer order, a chance encounter in the
street, or a bedroom conversation. This enables us to 'frame' the
interaction appropriately (Goffman, 1974) so that we both know how
to interpret what goes on in the context of what is really going on.
When you call up my homepage, by comparison, you may get there through
an orderly route via my institution, department, speciality, and so
on, but you might have found me because I'm 'nerdy homepage of the
month' on the homepage of someone in Mexico. If I knew that that was
the way people were going to get to me, I might have arranged my public
face differently.
Worse still,
your communications may be repeated by people you don't know to audiences
you never intended.
In electronic
mail, the channel of communication is so limited that aspects of the
embodied self can only be apparent if described by the sender. This
has had a considerable liberating effect for those who are socially
or functionally disadvantaged. It has also allowed others to establish
fraudulent and exploitative identities (Stone, 1991). Web pages provide
more opportunity for 'embodiment' though less for interaction. People
can present photos of themselves (and their children), favourite graphics,
snatches of speech, and access to a labyrinth of their interests and
contacts. The homepage provides a locus for electronic self. There's
even more possibility for misrepresentation than in Email, because
Web pages are carefully set up before presentation to the world, and
are only slightly interactive.
So what
is the communication involved in putting up a homepage? It is putting
yourself up for interaction in some way, even if only a limited way.
That limitation can be liberating. Goffman points out that one of
the difficulties of interaction lies in establishing contact, because
an offer to interact always leaves one open to rebuff. Conversely
starting an interaction always involves a risk about what the interaction
might lead to, and possible difficulty in ending it. On the Web you
can put yourself up for interaction without being aware of a rebuff,
and others can try you out without risking being involved further
than they would wish. There is another liberation that can be negative,
too. One of the regulating and controlling forces in face-to-face
interaction is embarrassment. That is less likely to work on the Web.
Others may find your Web page ridiculous, but you probably won't be
aware of it. Those others who might be prompted to find ways to mend
your presentation to reduce their own embarrassment in a face-to-face
encounter are unlikely to feel pressure to smooth over the interaction
between themselves and a Web page. So, in two senses, it is easy to
make a fool of yourself on the Web: there is little to stop you doing
it, but doing it will cause you little pain.
The expressive
resources available in HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language, are limited
and not altogether under the author's control: size and shape of screen
and display typeface depend more on the receiver than on the sender.
Some layout features like rules can be used. Lots of images can be
included, but the receiver can always choose not to receive them,
and may not have a system which is able to receive them. The same
applies to sound and video.
It seems
that the only reliable thing that can be used is the informational
content of the text. This is what novelists have used for years to
establish character, after all. For most people, though, it is difficult
to establish yourself as a whole person through a self- description:
it feels like an extended lonely-hearts advert. There are other resources
that can be mobilised: show me what your links are, and I'll tell
you what kind of person you are. This will be taken up in more detail
later. Now that some people are becoming familiar with the Web, and
know the 'usual' structure and content of homepages, it is possible
to use this 'frame' more or less ironically to convey more subtle
information.
The 'more
or less' of the last sentence is an introduction to further consideration
of the given/given off distinction suggested by Goffman. In many ways,
this distinction would seem not to apply in electronic communication.
Information about the self is explicitly stated and can be managed
by the person making the communication. On the internet, you can't
smell my breath, catch the tremor in my voice, or realise that I'm
watching the rest of the party over your shoulder. The implicit information
that does leak through is paralinguistic, rather than non-verbal -
a matter of style, structure and vocabulary - or paracommunicational
- a matter of how I deal with a Web page compared with customary ways
of doing it. Try calling up a succession of homepages and see if they
give you hints about the nature of the people who composed them, even
without reading any of the information given. Beware of taking these
impressions too seriously. Someone may chose to include a picture
of their fiance on their page: that picture may be incorporated
innocently and seriously, ironically, or in irony-transcending seriousness.
My sampling
of homepages for analysis has been very non-systematic. I checked
obvious homepages which cropped up in the lists produced by WebCrawler
searches for assorted other topics, pages with incomprehensible titles
(which often are personal homepages) that were marked in these searches,
pages suggested to me by colleagues as being worth looking at, and
homepages referred to on other pages. This last is the easiest source:
people on the Web seem to like introducing you to other people on
the Web . Some institutions, Princeton (1995) for example, have pages
which are purely lists of the personal homepages of people at the
institution. This non-systematic sampling has shown the enormous number
and range of personal homepages that there are out there; people feel
a desire to establish their selves on the Web. It has also made me
aware of the inadequacy of my approach so far. The impressionistic
account given here should be backed up with more systematic fieldwork
if this field is worth developing.
My impressionistic
survey suggested that pages could be grouped into several categories.
After each category I've suggested a non-electronic equivalent. I'm
not sure that these references to 'penpal letters', 'company reports'
and so an are helpful or productive: personal homepages are new kinds
of personal presentation in a new medium. But this is a paper which
starts from old analyses of well-established communications, and borrows
from them to look at the new, so the traditional analogies are in
keeping with the theme. More detailed work could tease out where these
analogies fail to apply, and so help to clarify what is new in this
communication. The analogies may be valid in another sense: the people
producing homepages are drawing on their knowledge and experience
of verbal and paper presentations of self to help them to construct
their electronic presentations, and so they will produce presentations
at least partly derived from those models. The interesting point is
when kinds of presentation emerge which can't be seen as analogous
to verbal or paper presentations of self. I'm not aware of this happening
yet, but then I'm blinkered by my lifelong experience of non-electronic
presentation of self...
Here are
my suggested categories:
1) Hi,
this is me (as an individual). The purpose of the page seems to
be purely self- presentation. Content may include: this is what I
look like, this is where I'm from, this is what I study (these pages
are often by male college students), these are my favourite bands/pastimes/books,
here are links to my friends' homepages, and here are some more neat/cool
links. A variant of this is where the page author has a major interest,
and the homepage is also a gateway to information about that interest.
Sometimes the initial page recognises the possible different motives
of those who arrive at it:
Hi, this
is me:
more personal information is here;
more about Lunar Landscape Studies is here.
(The non-electronic analogy might be a penpal letter.)
2) This
is me (as a member of an organisation). The most common examples
are faculty homepages. A brief CV, teaching and contact details, timetable
arrangements are the requirements, but some people choose to add more.
A 'frame analysis' (Goffman, 1974) is useful here in working out how
the self is presented. The clues to the person may not be in what
is said/done, but in how that relates to the structure defined by
others who are doing the same thing. Personality emerges from how
people bend or gently break the rules established (formally or informally)
by their institution.
(An entry in a student handbook)
3) Hi, this is us. These are family homepages, sometimes titled
as such.The content is more likely to be about membership, group structure,
and history than about the personal self of the individual posting
the page. Details of individuals emerge further down the tree of links,
and they are often third party descriptions rather than first party.
There is more emphasis on the personal achievements of the people
presented than in individual homepages, and in structure and content,
they are more like sets of pages produced by institutions rather than
persons. Perhaps what is being presented is the corporate identity
of the family.
(A company report; the Annual Family Circular sent to acquaintances
with a Christmas card.)
4) This
what I think is cool. These pages are the extreme of those described
as a subset of (1). Here there may be very little about the person
as an explicitly presented self, just examples and links to what they
enjoy or are interested in. A self emerges all the same.
(The analogy here is perhaps with inference of self, rather than presentation.
In this paper, I have not set out to present my self, and I've told
you very little about me, but you now know about ideas that have influenced
me, topics I think interesting, and the way I write about them - and
you will have formed some impression of the person who has written
this.)
5) An
advertisement for myself. There are some subcategories here:
5a) Cool
style. There is content to show that the person is particularly
skilful, interesting, or striking. More mundane information may be
left out, so the whole intent of the page is 'self-promotion' and
there is no pretence of the spurious objectivity of 'self-presentation'.
These pages can be tongue in check, and there may be links to ego-undermining
mundane information for those who really want to know.
(The analogy that occurred to me was with the collections of own work,
found objects and reference material that some design lecturers pin
up on their office walls. These are ostensibly a private version of
'what I think is cool' above, but they may tip over into a public
presentation of 'see what a cool person I am'. When I was a student,
some of the decorations in my college room were meant to serve the
same purpose, if I'm honest. Video dating might be an analogy in a
different medium.)
5b) The
electronic curriculum vitae. A very straightforward and honest
attempt to gain employment and a way of making your abilities and
occupational interests available round the world. I've come across
these randomly, but an effective presentation might be one which was
likely to be picked up by search engines - if there are people who
set search engines looking for pages from post-doc microbiologists
ready to work for less than $25,000.
(These are like paper CVs, though I don't know of a way in which paper
CVs can be posted for promiscuous consumption.)
5c) An
advertisement for the service I can provide. This falls in a range
between the CV and the impersonal corporate advert. Those that are
most a form of 'self-presentation' are from people whose services
depend on particular personal skill or charisma: designers and drag
artists are two examples I've found. These overlap with 'Cool Style'
above, but I think the intention is different, and there may be a
definite split between the 'commercial' and 'private' selves, which
will not be played up in the presentation.
(The best analogy is with the disk-based 'electronic CV', but at the
moment the Web's limited bandwidth and presentation style forces a
restricted version of what can be done on disk or CD. Non-electronically,
they're like flyers, demo tapes, or the people who stop you in the
street in Edinburgh at Festival time to charm you into coming to their
Fringe performance.)
There are
design groups advertising on the net who will construct sets of pages
to help you promote your business, and they are evolving styles and
conventions which will be taken up in self-promotions and self-presentations.
One of the complex 'family homepages' I found was through a link from
one of these designers. Will the same gulf develop between those of
us who have Web Designers to present our selves on the Web and those
who don't, as already exists between those who employ Interior Designers
in their homes and those who don't?
Some notes
on gender differences: many more men than women have personal homepages
on the Web, and although it's common for men to attach pictures of
themselves to their pages, it seems much less common for women to
do so. Apart from faculty homepages, where it may be corporate policy
to attach a photo, the only woman's picture I found at the top of
a homepage was a faint, blurred - decorative rather than informational
- photo on a page for a poet and performance artist. I have the impression,
though I haven't checked this, that women are less likely to have
their given name, which may identify their gender, in the title of
their page than men are. This wouldn't be surprising, for the same
reasons which make women less likely to put their given name below
the bell-push on their front door - avoidance of casual harassment.
Where does
this lead to in a discussion of 'electronic self'? One of the things
that has been a background worry in this discussion is the idea that
EC is not interpersonal interaction of the kind that Goffman was describing.
An interpretation of Goffman's work, and that of the Symbolic Interactionist
school in sociology, is that self is developed and maintained, as
well as presented, in interaction. Perhaps the electronic self of
the homepage can not be developed and maintained in EC, but has to
derive from face-to-face interaction, or at least email interaction.
Or are there kinds and categories of electronic selves which can be
presented and maintained in cyberspace, apart from our corporeal selves?
That is one of the fantasies of cyberspace, but the selves presented
in Web pages have not seemed to me to be qualitatively different from
selves presented in other ways, and their styles of presentation can
easily be likened to non-electronic presentations of self. This might
mean that this aspect of EC, at least, is not rich enough to support
the interactive development and definition of distinctive 'electronic
selves', or it might mean that we should wait to see what happens
when people have actually grown up with the Web. My feeling, as an
old-fashioned psychologist, is that sociality and interaction are
necessary for us to know who we are and what we can say about ourselves
to others, and much more depth and richness in EC is needed before
'electronic selves' can emerge. Contrariwise, much of the depth and
richness that we can think of adding would be to make EC more like
face-to-face interaction, which might suggest that electronic selves
could be developed in a different social context (continuing the extension
of the social world from the hamlet to the city to the global village)
but that many of the basic issues, moves and processes that go on
would be the same as they always were.
Even if
our selves will not be very different from what they always were,
EC provides an interesting new medium for us to use to display ourselves
and make claims about ourselves. At the beginning of this paper I
pointed out Goffman's distinction between what was 'given' and what
was 'given off' in an encounter. Even though Web pages are apparently
limited in the depth of information they provide compared with face-to-face
interaction, there is still room for information about the self to
be given off in the way people use the medium, in what they say as
well as what they don't say. A full appreciation of this has to wait
until we have an implicit understanding of the 'frames' that can be
applied to communication on the Web, so we know how to interpret what
people say about themselves in the context of 'what is going on' when
they say these things. In earlier times, relationships could be established
and maintained, and people could become people to other people, by
exchanging letters. Part of the skill in letter reading is in reading
between the lines. I was tempted to say that we just have to learn
to read between the pixels of Web pages, but I think we have to read
beyond the pixels to see how they express the social processes and
intentions that lie behind them.
References
Goffman, E (1959) The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life New York: Doubleday Anchor
Goffman, E (1961) Asylums New York: Doubleday Anchor
Goffman, E (1964) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Goffman, E (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of
Experience New York: Harper and Row
Goffman, E (1981) Forms of Talk Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Kendon, A (1988) Goffman's Approach to Face-to-Face Interaction in Drew,P
and Wootton,A (1988) Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order
Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 14-40
Stone,A (1991) Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories
about Virtual Cultures in Benedikt,M Cyberspace: First Steps Cambridge,
Mass: The MIT Press
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