Table of Contents
Subject: Communication Studies | Level: Undergraduate | Word Count: ~1500 words | Referencing: Harvard
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Apply Goffman’s dramaturgical theory to self-presentation on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) remains one of sociology’s most durable frameworks for understanding how individuals manage the impressions they give to others, conceptualising social interaction as a theatrical performance staged for an audience. Although Goffman developed his dramaturgical model from observations of face-to-face interaction in mid-twentieth-century settings, its central vocabulary, front stage, back stage, impression management, sign vehicles and teams, has proved remarkably adaptable to the study of platformed self-presentation. This essay applies Goffman’s framework to two contrasting social media platforms, Instagram and LinkedIn, arguing that both platforms function as front-stage performance spaces oriented towards different audiences and different idealised selves, but that both also expose the limits of Goffman’s original model, particularly his assumption that performers can reliably segregate audiences and control the setting of their performance. The essay first outlines Goffman’s core concepts before applying them in turn to Instagram and LinkedIn, and then considers the phenomenon of context collapse as a specifically digital complication of dramaturgical theory.
Goffman’s central claim is that individuals, whom he terms “performers”, engage in continuous impression management as they present themselves to others, selectively revealing and concealing information to sustain a particular definition of the situation (Goffman, 1959). He distinguishes the “front region”, where the performance for an audience takes place, from the “back region” or backstage, where performers can relax dramaturgical discipline, prepare for the performance and behave in ways inconsistent with the front-stage character. Performance is conveyed through “sign vehicles”, including “personal front” elements such as appearance, dress, manner and setting, all of which an audience reads as evidence of the performer’s claimed identity. Where several individuals cooperate to sustain a single definition of the situation, Goffman terms them a “team”, collaboratively managing a shared performance before a common audience, a concept with obvious relevance to organisational and family life alike.
Two further concepts are central to applying the framework to social media. “Idealisation” describes performers’ tendency to incorporate into their performance only those facts that are consistent with, and confirm, socially sanctioned values, presenting an enhanced rather than a neutral self. “Audience segregation” describes the practical strategy, essential to sustaining multiple identities, of ensuring that individuals who see one performance do not simultaneously witness a contradictory performance intended for a different audience; a manager presenting authority to subordinates, for instance, must generally avoid being observed deferring to their own superiors. Goffman assumed that physical co-presence made such segregation largely achievable, an assumption that networked, persistent and searchable digital platforms substantially complicate, as the following sections demonstrate.
Instagram exemplifies a platform optimised for the deliberate, aesthetic idealisation that Goffman’s model anticipates. Users construct a visual “grid” that functions as a highly curated front stage, selecting, cropping, filtering and captioning images to project a coherent identity, whether aspirational, lifestyle-oriented or professionally branded, while material inconsistent with that identity is typically deleted, archived or simply never posted. The platform’s affordances, editing filters, algorithmically ranked feeds and visible engagement metrics such as likes, intensify Goffmanian impression management by giving performers real-time feedback on audience reception, encouraging iterative refinement of the performance in a way Goffman’s face-to-face model did not anticipate (Chua and Chang, 2016).
Hogan (2010) usefully complicates a straightforward Goffmanian reading by distinguishing “performance”, Goffman’s live, synchronous, situationally responsive activity, from “exhibition”, the curation of artefacts for later, asynchronous viewing, arguing that platforms such as Instagram place users in the role of curator or “exhibitor” rather than live performer, selecting which artefacts of the self to display much as a museum curator selects objects for a collection. Instagram’s introduction of ephemeral Stories and restricted “Close Friends” lists nonetheless reintroduces something closer to Goffman’s backstage: a semi-private tier, accessible to a narrower, more trusted audience, where users disclose less polished, more provisional versions of self, evidence that even a predominantly exhibitionary platform retains a functional front-stage/back-stage distinction, simply relocated to different features rather than different physical rooms. Social comparison research further suggests that viewers, aware that grids are curated highlight reels rather than representative samples of daily life, nonetheless experience measurable declines in wellbeing when comparing their own unedited experience against others’ idealised performances (Chua and Chang, 2016).
LinkedIn stages a different, more narrowly professional front-region performance, oriented towards an imagined audience of recruiters, colleagues, clients and industry peers rather than the more socially mixed audience typical of Instagram. Personal fronts here consist of formalised sign vehicles, a professional headshot, a chronological employment history, credentialing badges, skill endorsements and recommendations from colleagues, all of which function similarly to Goffman’s account of how uniforms and credentials communicate role and competence before any interaction occurs. Team performances are pronounced on LinkedIn: colleagues routinely endorse one another’s skills and “like” or comment on each other’s posts, collaboratively sustaining a shared definition of professional competence and workplace culture that benefits the organisation as much as the individual.
Idealisation on LinkedIn typically takes the form of reframing ordinary career events, a job loss, a lateral move, a routine promotion, as narratives of growth, resilience or strategic choice, a pattern colloquially termed “humble-bragging” and consistent with Marwick’s (2013) concept of “self-branding”, in which individuals manage their online presence using techniques drawn from corporate marketing. A further complication is what might be termed the authenticity paradox of professional self-presentation: because audiences increasingly discount performances that appear too polished or transparently self-promotional, effective LinkedIn performers must incorporate carefully calibrated markers of spontaneity or vulnerability, brief admissions of failure, informal photographs, to appear sincere, meaning that even apparent departures from the professional front stage are themselves absorbed into a more sophisticated impression-management strategy rather than genuine backstage disclosure. Van Dijck’s (2013) account of “connective media” adds that LinkedIn’s own algorithms actively reward and amplify posts exhibiting this calibrated authenticity, meaning the platform itself, not merely the performer, shapes which version of professional selfhood becomes visible.
Goffman’s model presupposes that performers can exercise meaningful control over audience segregation, ensuring that a performance intended for one audience is not simultaneously observed by another for whom it would be inappropriate. Marwick and boyd’s (2011) concept of “context collapse” describes precisely how networked social media undermines this assumption: a single Instagram or LinkedIn post is potentially visible simultaneously to family members, employers, close friends, casual acquaintances and strangers, audiences that a performer would, in offline life, have addressed with distinct, carefully differentiated performances. Users respond by adopting an “imagined audience” strategy, mentally constructing a composite, lowest-common-denominator audience and calibrating disclosure to avoid offending or alarming its most conservative imagined member, a coping strategy Goffman’s framework did not need to accommodate because physical co-presence naturally segregated audiences.
A related complication concerns the persistence, searchability and replicability of digital content, affordances identified by boyd (2010) as fundamentally distinguishing networked publics from the ephemeral, face-to-face settings Goffman studied. Material posted to a semi-private backstage, an Instagram Story, a candid LinkedIn comment, can be screenshotted, archived or resurfaced years later before an unintended audience, collapsing the front-stage/back-stage boundary retrospectively in a way no offline performance risks. Algorithmic curation compounds this loss of performer control further still: a platform’s ranking system, rather than the performer, ultimately determines which audience segment actually encounters a given post and when, effectively installing an invisible, commercially motivated “stage manager” between performer and audience that Goffman’s original dramaturgical model, built around performers who directly control their own staging, has no equivalent mechanism to describe.
Applying Goffman’s dramaturgical theory to Instagram and LinkedIn confirms both the continuing explanatory power and the significant limitations of a framework developed for face-to-face interaction. On both platforms, users engage in recognisably Goffmanian impression management, curating personal fronts, idealising their presented selves and, on LinkedIn especially, working collaboratively within teams to sustain shared performances. Instagram’s Stories and Close Friends features, and LinkedIn’s calibrated performances of “strategic authenticity”, show that the front-stage/back-stage distinction persists in digitally mediated form rather than disappearing, even if relocated to different platform features.
However, phenomena unique to networked publics, context collapse, persistence, searchability and algorithmic curation, expose assumptions in Goffman’s original model that simply do not hold online, chiefly his assumption that performers can reliably segregate audiences and control their own staging. A satisfactory account of digital self-presentation therefore requires Goffman’s core vocabulary of performance and impression management, supplemented by concepts such as context collapse and Hogan’s performance/exhibition distinction, that address the specifically networked conditions under which contemporary platformed identity work now takes place, conditions Goffman himself never had reason to theorise.
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