What sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity

I just finished Erving Goffman's classic sociological text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. A friend told me to read this for an exploration into what "identity" means online, and I did find that the book offers some useful frameworks.

I have to admit, to start with, that it's a rather distasteful work: personally, I don't see my entire life as a performance and everyone around me as an audience. That seems to be just what Goffmn wants me to do. (He calls this attitude his "dramaturgical perspective.")

Furthermore, the book was published in 1959, just before the social revolution of the 1960s exploded the expectations of formality it documents--all the assumptions about proper behavior, social distinctions, making a good impression, and so forth. These distinctions remain, of course, but people tend to behave in ways that consciously disavow differences in class and status instead of highlighting them (at least in the United States).

Goffman's underlying framework is still valid, though, and it casts a useful light on some of the dilemmas of going online.

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