“And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.”
-Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was a really interesting topic of the week. Goffman theorizes that each of us has this presentation of self, or in other words, ways that we know we are expected to perform in certain situations. Within this presentation of self we see how we also balance these ideas of status and roles. Our status is our social position, our roles are our expected behaviors of a particular status, and our self-label is our power to present ourselves how we want to.
I really saw how prevalent this is in anyones life. We care what people think, or at the very least are aware of what they think. And this does have some sort of an effect on how we conduct ourselves in certain situations. Sometimes we act in ways that are not ourselves, or maybe feel unnatural, because we feel that is how we are expected to act.
This video is from What Would You Do, which used to (or maybe still does) air on ABC. I remember being in a situation like this at a restaurant, and witnessing the same things. At the time, I was too caught up in what my "role" was, and how I was expected to act, that I did not act at all. That is something I really regret. Sometimes ignoring how you are expected to act in a situation, and simply doing the right thing, is more worth it in the end.
I wrote about the same thing this week and also found these concepts to be pretty interesting. It is interesting to think that we do in a way edit what we would typically want to do depending on the social position we are in and the roles expected of us. I think it's necessary to "break character" in certain situations and not care what role you are presenting at the time. I think satisfying different audiences could simply get exhausting.
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