Overview

This is Erving Goffman’s most well known work, and is acknowledged as the foundation for his later work. The point of the book can really be summed up in its title: everyday life is a performance. The rest of the text serves as extrapolation and analysis, applying the thesis to numerous circumstances and situations. While Goffman is writing in 1959, his work and method serve as a remarkable starting point for the problem of character simulation within virtual worlds. It can also relate to human engagement in virtual worlds: Sociology of virtual worlds can be studied by analysis of the presentation and performance of the human participants.

Performance is Goffman’s solution to the matter of interaction, but interaction and performance both presuppose an audience. So the question of the self, the agent behind the performance is left deliberately ambiguous and unresolved. Even when alone, an individual still performs for his or her own sake. One can treat the “actual” self as the performing entity that chooses the performances, which is good enough for simulation, but seems incomplete to describe human interactors.

We can look at the self which Goffman leaves ambiguous and take it to one of two conclusions. One is that direction that Sherry Turkle might argue, that presentation gives individuals multiple perspectives on themselves. Underneath the multitude of masks can be triangulated a whole self, which is projected through each mask. So observing any single mask yields an incomplete understanding of an individual, but every additional one reveals additional details and is evidence that we are truly human underneath our shells. An opposing viewpoint might be offered by Jean Baudrillard, who asserts that the multitude of reflections is indication that there is no self underneath, that each mask is a reflection not of an agent underneath, but rather of other projections seen elsewhere. Masks are presentations that assert a reality, but this reality is a simulacra, imperfectly reproducing images seen elsewhere, images that themselves are reproductions. These reflections proceed endlessly until it is impossible to determine what the real is underneath, or whether it is there or if it ever existed in the first place.

Ultimately, we may find that Goffman’s ideas can be applied to simulation, but the ambiguous self can work for us. Simulated entities have no selves, and via sufficient indirection in software, they can reflect and represent substance found in the real world. Human interactors may find via their interaction with the simulation and its many representations better lenses and reflections to understand themselves and their surroundings.

Notes

Interaction requires knowledge of the other to understand and apply stereotypes. We have little information that we know is true to prepare us for new interactions, thus individual must express and observers must be impressed with the presentation. Reason is made on the basis of inferences – William Thomas. (p. 2)

Practices emerge around the rituals of presentation and observation. Games emerge to play with these things. Fantasy, teasing, embarassing stories serve social function for easing role portrayal, they expose a conflict between the individual and the ideal projection. This slipperyness and confusion exposes a human dimension underneath the presentation. (p. 14)

Role performances and extremes: Cynicism vs belief. Both have defensive mechanisms in protecting the performer, thus one’s relation to a performance will probably fall at one extreme or the other. Transitions may occur when a performer feels immersed or disaffected by a role. (p. 19)

The front of a performance: Forms of support that help define it and lend to its credibility. Can be setting, appearance, personal characteristics, manner. The front may be internal or external in nature. The front connects to class roles, actors may find that fronts exist for roles when taking one on. (p. 24)

Dramatizing ones work means to make the invisible costs (associated with the work) visible, as well as some other things. To appear normal or undramatic, great special care must be made. This suggests that we are more in tune with our roles and that the image of the natural may be a construct. (p. 32)

On idealization: this is a semiotic/mythological reference. Roles exist beyond the individual. The ideal is a conception of the essence of a role, to which the individual is disposable. (p. 35)

Presentation vs concealment: Individuals may conceal parts of work, or aspects of their person. This echoes Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents- that to operate in civilization, one must suppress instinct and aspects of the self. The discrepancy between the parts of work and the appearance can lend legitimacy to the work and the performance. (p. 44)

Performance is something that must not be broken: It is transcendental in a fashion. Citing Simone DeBeauvoir: Performance surpasses and eclipses the body. It is an identification with something unreal, both more than life and less than human. (p. 57)

Some misrepresentation of selves is villainized or culpable. This is a matter of authorization, though: is someone authorized to perform a role? Other times, deliberate misrepresentation is acceptable or expected. (p. 61) This is especially interesting from the simulation perspective.

The performance of being: “To be a given kind of person, then, is not merely to possess the required attributes, but also to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto. The unthinking ease with which performers consistently carry off such standard-maintaining routines does not deny that a performance has occurred, merely that the participants have been aware of it.” (p. 75)

Teams are to be taken as a point of reference in understanding coordinated behavior. It serves to shift focus away from the individual as acting subject, replacing it with the team. Team performance implies complicity and dependence. Formal compulsion to play a role exists in individuals, and helps tighten the dependency in team performance. (p. 81)

The line (which is discussed further in Interaction Ritual), of a performance must be maintained despite failure or disagreement among participants. They must suppress the immediate desire to punish and instruct the offender in cases when a teammate fails in a task. (p. 89)

On front and back spaces: There is a certain place for a main performance, which is the front space. However, there is also a “backstage” area where different rules apply. The boundaries between them are interesting and can lead to complications and embarrassment when permeated. Examples are the kitchen in a restaurant or a teacher’s lounge. Performance still occurs on both sides, but the audience changes, and presentation can change drastically. (p. 120)

Regions are frames and situate behavior, the front for one performer may be the back for another, these standards are culturally determined. All sides have performances, but the role-space performances are different. (p. 126)

Audience segregation: roles require space and an audience. Having a blend in the audience or space introduces uncomfortability and confusion. This leads to an interesting triad: together the performer, space, and audience define a role performance. (p. 136)

On secrets: There are several types of secrets held by individuals or teams: dark, strategic (intended to be disclosed strategically), inside (knowledge is a mark of membership), entrusted (held for others), and free. Importance of secrets is relative to the knower and the team. (p. 142)

Goffman describes several discrepant roles, kinds that blend the status of performer and audience member. These orient around the relation to performance, the relation to the audience, and types of information held. (p. 166)

Communication between performers that occurs without role of character: Staging cues, to facilitate performance and direct the audience without active character cues. Derisisive collusion [biplay] is playful mocking within roles. (p. 186)

Practices to maintain countenance and continuity of performance in face of “scenes” or “incidents”. Loyalty: maintaining the border between performers and audience. Types of defensive practices made by performers: loyalty, discipline, circumspection. (p. 212)

Tact and etiquette are protective and insulating, respectively. Tact is employed by audience to evidence respect and acknowledgment over role performances, even when performance is silly or poor. Thus its function is to protect the performer. The knowledge of the application of tact is a moment which has the potential to lay bare the constructed nature of the performance: “I would like to add a concluding fact about tact. Whenever the audience exercises tact, the possibility will arise that the performers will learn that they are being tactfully protected. When this occurs, the further possibility arises that the audience will learn that the performs know that they are being tactfully protected. And then, in turn, it becomes possible for the performers to learn that the audience knows that the performers know they are being protected. Now when such states of information exist, a moment in the performance may come when the separateness of the teams will break down and be momentarily replaced by a communication of glances through which each team openly admits to the other its state of information. At such moments the whole dramaturgical structure of social interaction is suddenly and poignantly laid bare, and the line separating the teams momentarily disappears. Whether this close view of things brings shame or laughter, the teams are likely to draw rapidly back into their appointed characters.” (p. 233) Etiquette is tactful inattention by an audience to information considered private or non-appropriate for the audience to know. Normally people are left to their own business, and etiquette is the insulating activity that keeps this separate.

The individual is divided between performer and character. Character is something to build things with. It is different from “self-production”, but can lead to synchronization. Is the thing built from characters society? (p. 252)