The drama of Facebook

The world's largest and most successful social network, Facebook - celebrated its tenth anniversary in February 2014. In its short lifetime it has become the most popular virtual meeting place for millions of friends, family, and long-lost acquaintances worldwide. Boasting a growing membership that is currently well in excess of 1.2 billion users, and valued as the third richest company in the U.S., Facebook is a social phenomenon that cannot be ignored. The diverse behaviours witnessed on the site are just one of the many features that provoke great interest from psychologists and social anthropologists, and many studies have already been conducted into Facebook's impact of relationships, social movements, self concept and personal, digital identity. One social anthropologist in particular might have had a great deal to say about the Facebook effect.

Erving Goffman is well known for work on psychiatric asylums, social rituals and stigma. Perhaps his best known work is embodied in his Drama model of social interaction. Developing his theory, Goffman's thinking was probably influenced by symbolic interactionists such as George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, and sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons. In his Dramaturgical Model of human interaction Goffman argued that each of us 'manage our impression' when we find ourselves in the presence of others. Using the drama metaphor, he proposed that each of us has a 'front stage', where we are at our most guarded, and present ourselves according to prevailing cultural norms, values and expectations. It is a kind of 'performance' where we conceal unpleasant or undesirable aspects of our personae, whilst emphasising desirable and more attractive attributes to our 'audience' of others. This is also the region within which we adopt roles and present specific mannerisms, follow scripts and project a controlled appearance that may be further enhanced with props and costumes. Conversely, the 'back stage' region is where we are less guarded and more relaxed, and reveal a more natural representation of ourselves. This is usually a more honest persona, where we 'let our hair down' and step out of the character we may have adopted in front stage, formal roles. The back stage is a space seemingly devoid of an audience, and an area where the individual might feel able to relax into a more authentic, less contrived persona.

Facebook users may feel that they are at home and relaxed when they are online, and 'among friends'. Maybe it is perceived by them as a back stage area where they can relax after a hard day at the office. Never the less, they are performing a role, and are unwittingly engaging with an audience of others. Because Facebook is generally a public space that can be manipulated and 'controlled' by privacy settings, many Facebook users may indeed be in a more private space with their 'friends'. Many however are largely ignorant of the privacy controls and unknowingly leave themselves open to observation from 'outsiders'. They thus fail to manage their impression effectively in this front stage region, because they assume that they are located within a back stage region devoid of an audience. This may be one explanation why people appear to be less guarded on social media, and feel free to say things they would never dream of saying in a real-life public space. The incongruence - in Goffman's terms - of someone adopting a back stage, relaxed role, whilst unknowingly existing a front stage area, can have disastrous consequences upon their self concept, or their reputation.

Friends and others who may have access to the user's personal artefacts, such as text information, conversations, pictures and videos, have the ability to publish these more widely that the user might be comfortable with. Their content, devised for a back-stage context is suddenly thrust into the limelight of a front stage region. Images of users that were intended solely for private use might be reposted to wider circles of 'friends of friends' without the subject's permission, and then the horrified individual has to request that that image be removed. They find themselves thrust into a front stage position against their will, and are then at the mercy of the person who posted the image. Indeed, many relationships have been damaged or fractured because of such actions. Worse, some of the more vulnerable users who have become victims of cyber-bullying and blackmail have tragically taken their own lives. Those who fall foul of the trap of thinking they are acting in a private, back stage space, also discover the dangers of unguarded moments, when they are dismissed from their jobs or their reputation is tarnished.

For many, the drama of Facebook is very real.

Photo by Tim Green


The drama of Facebook by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.