Blog 3: Erving Goffman — Presentation of Self
Introduction
Erving Goffman, a Canadian sociologist and social psychologist from mid 20th century, had a great focus on social life and the way individuals interact with one another (Fine & Smith, 2000). More than 50 years ago he developed the idea of the ‘Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’. Derived from Shakespeare’s play ‘As You Like It’, this theory set out to examine an individual’s versions of themselves that they show to the world in different social aspects presented accordingly to achieve the most desirable image. (Bullingham & Vasconcelos, 2013) The theory presents the idea of one’s frontstage and backstage personality. Backstage being the more personal, true version of one’s self and the frontstage, the many ‘masks’ they choose to present.
Various group settings can prompt an individual to raise self-presentational motivations to match what comes off best (Baumeister & Hutton, 1987); this can be related to a social media setting whereby they present a persona they want to show to their online audience.
Asperger’s
In the case of Greta Thunberg, it could be suggested that her frontstage and backstage wouldn’t differ too vastly. As mentioned in the previous blog post, she has Asperger’s syndrome. Studies have suggested that individuals with ASD are conceptualized as bad actors and therefore face challenges when learning and adjusting to social roles that others may adapt well too (Geva, 2013a). They more structured roles, ‘credited performances’, for Thunberg this could roles such as giving speeches at conventions or even social media however more fluid and dynamic roles, such as regular social settings or unscripted interviews etc would be much more difficult and possibly discreditable by the general public (Geva, 2013b).
Audience
Despite being from Sweden, Thunberg has had a worldwide influence and her fans span across the globe with her highest number of followers being from the US, U.K. and Canada (Jung et al., 2020). After analysing a range of her tweets over a period of one week, only 2 tweets out of 70 (2.8%) were written in her native language, with the majority being written in English. Despite Twitter’s ‘translate tweet’ function, this is most likely a choice Thunberg made as English is a much wider spoken language than Swedish and would therefore have the furthest reach among an audience.
As well as using English, the language she uses tends to be more emotive, a good way of helping people understand the severity of the crisis. Two examples of this are shown below.
“You say you love your children above all else and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.” — (Thunberg, 2019)
“I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” — (Thunberg, 2019)
Rather than having long wordy speeches that many people would become bored with, she uses short, concise sentences and have a much bigger impact. She reinforces the fact she is a teenager and should be in school, not having to take the lead on this problem. She shows the pain and anguish the destruction of the environment gives her through her words in the hopes that people will feel the same and make the changes needed. Relating to the front stage and backstage masks spoken about before, this emotion she feels towards the environmental crisis is how she feels backstage but is shown front stage, again reinforcing her ‘masks’ or lack of in this case, that she shows to her audience.
Her target audience would consist of mainly; the general public as she urges them to consider their climate impact and what they can do to help the environment, people her own age since they are the future and their environmental awareness could help the future of the planet and finally, world leaders as the power to implement these changes is in their hands. This has been shown through Thunberg giving speeches at events such as the UN Climate Action Summit, these were then posted on social media reaching the general public.
In the seven-day study of Greta’s tweets, it was found that 69 out of 70 tweets and retweets (not including replies) were environment related while one was related to Covid-19 and 1/5th (14 out of 70) of these were facts and statistics helping to educate people on the climate crisis.
As well as this, outside of the seven-day window there has been some significant tweets and twitter profile changes about and by Thunberg that are much less ‘business’ related, if you will, but more colloquial and humanistic, the way most teenagers would use Twitter. For example, when she used Donald Trump’s own words against him during the 2020 election. The two tweets are presented below, this is one of Thunberg’s most popular tweets with 1.8 million likes while the majority of tweets about environmental concerns gain around (how many likes).
Another moment she had on twitter that was similar is when a woman competed on the popular quiz show Mastermind and answered a question about Greta and referring to her as Sharon. Greta then changed her Twitter name to Sharon as a joke, this became extremely big within social media meme culture. (ITV News, 2020)
Based on Goffman’s theory and the idea of using a mask, or in this case, not changing mask and continuing to be herself and share her opinions, it has become clear that some adults see this as a ‘child’ telling them what to do and some do not like this. On twitter, Thunberg receives a lot of hate from people and this tends to be from adults, men in particular. The video below shows how people have seen this and mocked the men doing such things.
Conclusion
To conclude, it can be seen that Greta Thunberg’s use of a ‘mask’, according to Goffman, is not really as prevalent as it would be with some other influencers. As you can see by the research, her main focus on social media is the same as her main focus in life: the environment. The only other potential mask is that she is just a regular teenager.
This is not to discredit Goffman’s theory since there is far too much evidence in support of him and many users of social media, particularly influencers do show ‘masks’ in place of their real selves to create a more desirable presence on social media, however this does show that it is not possible to apply this theory to everyone.
Reference List:
- Baumeister, R.F. and Hutton, D.G. (1987). Self-Presentation Theory: Self-Construction and Audience Pleasing. Theories of Group Behavior, [online] pp.71–87. Available at: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4612-4634-3_4 [Accessed 17 Dec. 2020].
- Bullingham, L. and Vasconcelos, A. C. (2013) “‘The presentation of self in the online world’: Goffman and the study of online identities.” Journal of Information Science, 39(1) pp. 101–112.
- Democracy Now (2018) “You Are Stealing Our Future: Greta Thunberg, 15, Condemns the World’s Inaction on Climate Change.” YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzeekxtyFOY&ab_channel=DemocracyNow%21
- Fine, G. and Smith, G. (2020). Erving Goffman. [online] SAGE Publications Ltd. Available at: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/erving-goffman/book210765 [Accessed 17 Dec. 2020].
- FridaysForFuture (2019) “The Greta Thunberg Helpline.” YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl99R6FM5s8&ab_channel=FridaysForFuture
- Geva, A. (2012). Asperger’s syndrome through the lens of the dramaturgical model. [online] International Journal of Developmental Disabilities. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/2047386912Z.00000000019 [Accessed 17 Dec. 2020].
- ITV News (2020). Greta Thunberg changes Twitter handle to “Sharon” in honour of Amanda Henderson’s Celebrity Mastermind slip-up. [online] ITV News. Available at: https://www.itv.com/news/2020-01-03/greta-thunberg-changes-twitter-handle-to-sharon-in-honour-of-amanda-henderson-s-celebrity-mastermind-slip-up [Accessed 28 Dec. 2020].
- Jung, J., Petkanic, P., Nan, D. and Kim, J. H. (2020) “When a Girl Awakened the World: A User and Social Message Analysis of Greta Thunberg.” Sustainability, 12(7), 2707, p.16
- Thunberg, G. (2019) “Our house is on fire”: Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate. the Guardian. The Guardian. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate [Accessed on 10 December 2020]
