Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of
Self in Everyday
Life
Goffman is a sociologist, in one of his most influential of the
presentation of self in everyday life.Goffman made the analogy of our
life as a play in the theatre. It takes about the face to face
interaction. In this piece, it imagined a play in daily life. Take
myself for example, I have face to face communication with people
everyday, from purchasing a cup of coffee, to attending school lectures,
but rarely I think of my daily life as a play or theatre. In Goffman’s
piece, the presentation of self in everyday life. He uses this imaginary
theatre to talk about face to face interaction. There is front stage
where people contact the other person, there are some degree of control
to present the impression, this contact will change one person’s
“setting.” Goffman’s theory takes us to a closer look to small scale
people’s interaction.
In order to understand the bigger picture, sometimes it takes to see
from bottom up and it is what Goffman’s approach for people sudy back in
1956 when it is first published. However, I found the idea interesting
and useful. The same method is seen in use in psychodrama therapy
between 1920-1940 created by Jacob L. Moreno. The timeline make me
wonder does it have to do with the war? Then people started to re-think
of what people to people interaction means and how we see it. To
stressed the importance of people to people communication, I would like
to take a look of the experiment done in April 1967 at Cubberley High
School, Northern California. The well-known experiment is called the
Third Wave. It started out as a history class experiment, where there
have students participate a week long experiment which modeled after
Fascism and Nazi period in Germany. There were about 30 student
participants in the class and they started out with made up salutation
posture and disciplines. “Strength through discipline! Strength through
community! Strength through action!” From an outsider’s point of view,
it seems strange how an obviously wrong concept can move so many people,
and followed by a nation’s population. The experiment later turned into
a novel for young adult called “The Wave.” However, in reality the
experiment runs well, in terms of getting students into the concept of
fascism. But what is the problem here? In the later written novel, it
attribute the reasoning to peer pressure. Do they know it was a play and
the students were all actors in the setting? Besides the novel, the
“successful” experiment later turned into film, tv shows, and numerous
article. Was it too late to learn from history? Or can we educate
students what to see from the begiing to avoid peer-pressure, to see
beyond what is presented? Even it is, as Goffman said, a “All the world
is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are
not easy to specify” (Goffman, 1959: 72).
In Goffman’s piece, one important notion that consist the modern stage
of the play, which is: telecommunication. To me it adds more
complication, and it can be a strength to the modern world if we see it
wisely. Otherwise, I can see the situation of communication worsen.
Because when we can’t communicate well in face-to-face with enough
information to read and understand the actor’s intention. How can we
tell from telecommunication, when we can’t see the other party. Does it
mean there are more backstage acting?
Actor-network theory can affect
people’s approach for using technology to
communicate
In 1980 actor network theory first appeared in Europe. The major
creators of the theoretically methodology to the social study is Michel
Callon, Bruno Latour, and visiting British Professor John Law. Among the
three creators, the ANT theorists writing are equally esoteric. However,
Bruno Latour’s philosophical approach provokes my thoughts profondally.
The ANT methodology makes me rethink and define my relationship with
events around me. If Goffman’s presentation of self in everyday life
imagine the world as a theatre stage. Actor-Network Theory on the other
hand, is the script that describes individual character’s relationship
with one and another.
One aspect which illustrates the relations between people,
communication, and technology can be identified as Actor-network
theory(ANT). In brief, the theory is constructed by Bruno Latour, John
Law, ,and Michel Callon. It discussed the actor which is human and
actant, which is acting upon non human such as electricity or in this
paper which will be technology. And everything is in the network, what
we need to think about is the connection. Network here is intermediation
which connects from one to another, regardless it is an actor to an
actor, an actor to an actant, whithin the network occur action. However,
the chaos we experience in modern society as human based on ANT have two
main reasons. First of all, we assign agency to things and perhaps
consciousnessly; secondly, we mix nature and culture together. He starts
with newspaper reading, about ozone, anarchy, etc. The newspaper opens
the opinion of overall about Chemical reaction and political reaction,
reaction from nature versus culture. Global and Local. Then The author
explain the notion Hybrid, and proliferation both recognize and deny it.
We describe phenomenon as hybrid but it is not the same nature and
culture.
In Shapin and Schaffer book who are the figure of
culture and science?
-
Who is the figure who produce the notion for culture: Hobbes
-
Who is the figure who produce the notion for science:Robert Boyle,
Boyle’s law.
-
Principal of Boyle’s Law comes from experiment. You believe in a
hypothesis so you perform it. And it becomes facts. And we build upon
it. However, it scientific experiment. It is hard to reproduce the
same result. Boyle’s law has lots of variable. Scientific law has lots
of qualifiers. Law was produce in a messy mixture which is the same
way how we produce human law.
-
Science somewhat constructs from social structure.
-
We assume the scientific is invent and is pure, adjective and perfect.
However Latour suggests these hybrid leads to chaos.
In ANT critics’s point of view, the methodology maybe utopian and
simplified. Throguh Actor network theory to understand the world, it
will divorce the notion of sexism, racial discrimination
Instead of identifying what nonhumans are, ANT encourages us to consider
what nonhumans do. For Sayes it is what things in the world contribute
to society that matters most. In other words, instead of focusing on
what kinds of things (e.g. scallops, classified documents, unbuilt
French transportation systems) are qualify as “nonhuman” for the
purposes of analysis, we should just ask what role it plays in the
scenario you’re trying to understand. Sayes classifies the contributions
of nonhumans into four categories: Actor netowork provide a lens to
understand what technology’s role in society’s setting.
ANT does not a priori divide the world into micro and macro
contexts or attribute agency to either individuals or social structures.
Rather, agency is assumed not to be limited to individuals, objects or
social determinants, but as emerging as an effect of the interactions of
network components.
These components theoretically consist of the same basic building blocks
[46].
ANT therefore focuses on examining the micro context. For instance, individuals
directly interacting with technology) and uses findings to draw
conclusions about the macro context (e.g. the political environment in
which individual practices are situated).
This is achieved by incorporating actors from both contexts into the
same network
].
Complexity is, however, difficult to study and it is important to
recognise that one will never be able to capture the full picture of
social reality.
Nevertheless, ANT can help researchers to ”zoom in” on the way networks
consisting of human and non-human actors are formed at any point in
time. This focus on micro contexts can help to shed light on the
subtleties of social reality and thereby help to make inferences in
relation to wider social processes (”by zooming out”).
Actor-Network Theory
ANT’s main feature is its focus on inanimate entities and their effect
on social processes. An actor is thus defined as the ”source of an
action regardless of its status as a human or non-human”; this is a
radical notion in that it contests that inanimate things (e.g. such as
technology) can also have agency. An actor can
however only act in combination with other actors and in constellations
that give the actor the possibility to act - this is because reality is
assumed to be actively performed by various actors in a particular time
and place [8, 13, 15, 16]. Thus inherent to ANT is a move away from
the idea that technology impacts on humans as an external force, to the
view that technology emerged from social interests (e.g. economic,
professional) and that it thus has the potential to shape social
interactions.
(Cresswell, Worth, and Sheikh
2010)
Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media, what
are people’s first impression to new technology.
How can we learn from existing and relatively more established
communication technology. Jeffrey Sconce take us on a media archaeology
tour. What can we learn from the development of technology, what phonoem
do we see throughout the recent history of communication?
Originally, I didn’t find the piece interesting or related to discover
new particularly found relations with my research in visual perception.
After the second and third read, I started to understand through
Sconce’s piece, it closely and intentionally document telecommunication
from telegraph’s use in 1840 and continuously swift to elegraph to
television, wireless telegraph, network radio broadcasting in the 1920s,
television in the early 1960s, and cyberspace today. What were people’s
reaction in a culture historian’s view. For example, in the opening the
Sconce takes three distinctive news in different places to emphasis the
phenomenon of telecommunication. //insert examples.
A cultural interpretation. For Sconce there are ”three recurring
fictions or stories” and ”five distinct moments in the popular history
of electronic presence” that need to be considered (8). The first of
these stories is about disembodiment that allows the communicating
subject ”the ability, real or imagined, to leave the body and transport
his or her consciousness to a distant destination” (9).The second and
closely related fiction tells of a sovereign electronic world that is
somehow beyond the material realm that we mortals live in. A cast of
androids and cyborgs inhabits the third fiction, which addresses the
anthropomorphizing of media technology. These three stories, Sconce
asserts, have been told countless times during the last 150 years. Yet,
as Sconce is quick to emphasize, it is the discontinuities that matter
more than the supposed similarities. ”Tales of paranormal media are
important, then, not as timeless expressions of some undying electronic
superstition but as a permeable language in which to express a culture’s
changing social relationship to a historical sequence of technologies”
Conclusion
\cite{latour1993}
\cite{latour1993}
To conclude, this essay has addressed a number of significant issues
including how we see and perceive using cognitive psychology to
understand, what we perceive may interpret in different meanings in our
brain, the problems we have with communication through technology
through the sociology and readings from established researchers.
Actor-network theory which shows that we study subjects individually and
forget about the connection in between.
The evidence highlights in perception. It is often studies as though it
were an isolated activity. However, it is a necessary part of physical
behavior, and often it provides the motive for that behavior. We
perceive, and based on our perception, we act. We use perception to
monitor and control our action. To improve our ability to perceive, we
often move toward the object of perception. We filter out most of the
information we receive, and attend to only those features of our
perception that we need to guide an action. (\cite{kruger}p.199) Most of us knows about vision test, it tests your vision
accuracy, if its 20/20 or adjustment is needed. But there are more to
learn about visual perceptual ability. For example, focusing, eye
tracking, fixation, binocular, fusion visions…just to name a few.
When visual information is perceived incorrectly, instead of reinforcing
the experience, it distracts, and treated as cannot be trusted. The
visual perception test at the market are either expensive or in the
designer’s world, it is used to accommodate the perceptual tendency. I
see this research in steps and the first step is reminding people that
there is more than if you can see, there is your visual perception. Then
understand individuals visual perception strength and weakness. There
are so many factors can affect communication. To begin with, we need to
learn what we are looking at, and understand our visual perception
strength and weakness because it is the first and most used information
reception which contacts to our brain.
As human we tend to be biased. We believe what we see. But what we see
often does not process correctly. It is even seldom mentioned. I begin
the exploration form small incidents, and events that perceptual me.
Which mentioned in case studies. And I try to examine them in different
ways. The journey so far has been exciting, I found out about different
ways to understand my surroundings. In this paper, I dived deeper in
visual perception and particularly how to recognize facial expressions.
I believe, understanding how we see and know what we are seeing will
mitigate the gap of understanding. It’s easy to make mistakes in
perception. We stereotype, we rely on perceptual sets, we commit
attribution errors, and more. The first step to improving our perceptual
abilities is to be mindful of our perceptions. We must be aware of our
perceptual tendencies, and conscious of how those tendencies might
affect accurate perception. The first thing we can do is to know
yourself: Recognize your own tendencies toward bias. The second thing we
can do is to focus on other people’s characteristics. We might recognize
their group memberships, but it’s important to treat each person as an
individual. Third, we should check the accuracy of our perceptions. In
part, this means separating interpretations from facts. This also means
generating alternative perceptions. We can test our perceptions for
accuracy, sometimes by simply asking the other person if our perception
is correct. Lastly, we should revise our perceptions as necessary.
Sometimes our perceptions are accurate from the start, and other times
they simply are wrong. It’s important to recognize and admit this. At
the same time we still have haptic, audio, olfactory, taste to explore.
We know we notice different things, and there are differences between
culture, up-brings which can affect how we understand or feel the same
material. But the one thing that we all share is visual perception
ability. If we can understand what we are seeing, we can approach other
factors objectively. The specialist who have profound knowledge of
visual perception ability usually work around it, or wait for the
symptom occurs then try to cure it. I think we can work toward it.
\cite{1956}
\cite{latour1993}