Me: The Exhibition

In the mid-to-late 90s my dad bought a computer that could access the internet. Sat at it in the kitchen, I could interact with people I had never met before, and probably never would again, through chat rooms such as AOL instant messaging. Users were identifiable by a screenname which they chose themselves, and I could connect by clicking on their screenname and starting a conversation, usually with the shorthand question “asl?”, asking for their age, sex and location. I quickly lost count of the numerous alter-egos I created for myself, apparently liberated by the anonymity of having no visual identity. In conversations users could construct their own backstory and perform a personality of their choosing. Was there anything real in those interactions? Were they genuine insofar as they were unmediated by cultural regulations of face-to-face interactions, or simply fabrications and role-plays that were entertaining but not illustrative of the user’s ‘real’ identity?  

In the early age of mass internet communication some social theorists predicted a post-human future for the internet (Stone, 1996), with the emergence of digital identities and communities leading to a disruption of gender norms (Buckingham, 2008) and the internet becoming a site for young people to consciously construct their identities free of the burden of their material selves (Turkle, 1995). Contrary to this, users were generally found to bring their offline norms of social practice with them to online communities; “people communicating through chat rooms or IRC (internet relay chat) were still people” (Marwick, 2013). Oppressional behaviour that was ‘learned’ in offline social structures was frequently observed in interactions, and we’re all too aware of the presence of ‘dark forces’ online, that subject young people to different risks. Furthermore, the seeking of physical markers though approaches such as the ‘asl’ question demonstrate how online users still want to contextualise a person through physical information, and hence the physical body online still holds relevance (Joinson et al, 2012). 

The internet has completely changed the way we do interactions, and for some it has provided access to connections with likeminded people that would have never been possible without it. For subjugated masculinities and femininities, online communities can provide incredible networks of support, unlike anything available when I was a teenager (McInroy, 2019). However, the potential to construct various, sometimes radical, online identities has diminished in mainstream use with the rise in commercial social media, as well as the increase in technological affordances of different platforms, including increasingly the use of photographic and video media. Facebook for email addresses to join, and real names to be displayed as profiles, then in 2008, Facebook Connect linked users with websites, enabling the sharing of huge volumes of trackable information with businesses. This move to commercial social software, with interlinking accounts across numerous platforms has “brought with it an impetus to adhere to a single, fixed identity.” (Marwick, 2013, p4). Of course, there are online environments where we might present different versions of ourselves, such as the professional performance on a LinkedIn profile, versus the informal messaging between friends through a platform such as WhatsApp. Consequently, Goffman’s (1959) conclusions that people present themselves differently during face-to-face interactions, based on context and audience, remain a valuable tool for analysis of the construction and performance of online identities. 

Hogan (2010) distinguishes the presentation of the self online into performances (or “situations”) and artifacts (or “exhibitions”). A performance is staged, given to an audience with the actor front stage and engaging in impression management. The early forays into chat rooms were exactly this: an idealised version of the self was presented, bounded by space and time, such that users controlled the stage direction and were permitted to ‘bring the curtain down’ on their performance when they chose, and able to separate audiences on their own timings.  Artifacts on the other hand are not bounded by time, but continuously available to audiences; artifacts give off an impression. Individuals can create “exhibitions” where they upload their artifacts, such as the ‘profile page’, or the feed available on platforms such as Instagram. 

It has been argued (Lewis et al., 2008; Tufekci, 2008) that because access to these profiles can be controlled by the user and restricted to ‘friends’ or ‘friends of friends’ for example, then this constitutes a backstage region. Accordingly, access to a person’s exhibition is metaphorically the ‘drawing back of the curtain to reveal their true selves’. However, the lessons of the past two decades of social media have shown that users are rarely approaching it as a private space, free from the scrutiny of others, and with good reason: we try to teach our kids about the permanence of mistakes made online. Instead, users submit to their exhibitions, and rely on third parties to curate them to a perpetual audience.

Hogan argues that exhibitions are beyond the scope of Goffman’s performances: they are not bound by space and time, and offline forms of impression management are substituted for filtering and ordering as managed by the site’s computers (Hogan, 2010, p382). This is true of platforms where asynchronous interactions take place, but not so of online worlds where users are co-present, such as live gaming, where Goffman’s (1959) analogy of the performer still holds. Bullingham and Vasconcelos (2013) use the dramaturgical approach to analyse the presentation of the self in ‘front stage’ online performances in situations such as this.

When a social media user submits an artifact (content including pictures, tweets, responses to other’s content, etc) to a site it is stored by the site and redistributed to audiences by the processes of filtering and ordering by the curator. Filtering is first displaying only the information that the audience has requested; in offline situations audiences are not able to remove performers from their experience but online the audience can search for an exhibition, including those artifacts submitted in the past. More significantly, filtering is performed by the curator through an algorithm which presents to the audience, through a set of rules and calculations, the artifacts that the algorithm reasons will be most appealing. These artifacts are then ordered according to their perceived relevance to the audience. T he workings of these algorithms are guarded as industry secrets (Merunková & Šlerka, 2019), but by returning filtered artifacts they feed into a system of exaggerated presentations (which I want explore in more detail) and homophily in networks (Cinelli et al, 2021), or more generally the formation of echo chambers (Rhodes, 2022) wherein users identities are causally reformed due to social media algorithms.

It is important to examine what an online social network is in considering the nature of front and backstage performance online. Offline we can appreciate levels to our social network that includes close friends and family amongst which we may feel we can share secrets and arguably drop some of the frontstage performances, and then a wider network of social contacts for whom we continually engage in impression management. Regarding the classification of ‘friend’ online, boyd (2006) found that users of Myspace and Friendster (social media sites which predate Instagram and Facebook) listed 13 reasons for befriending someone, with only one being that they actually were a friend (other reasons included wanting to appear more popular, or that it was easier to confirm a friendship than say no to the request). I just had a look and apparently, I have 610 Facebook friends, which is a lot more than any estimate I would put on my number of genuine friends, those that I feel I could really ‘be myself’ infront of without significant care of trying to make a positive impression. 

The overlapping of our different social levels online creates situations where close friends, distant relatives, work associates and indeed all connected users all converge into one collapsed context (boyd, 2007; Loh & Walsh, 2021). Here Goffman’s idea of impression management in order to separate the visibility of contextualised performances for different audiences is not possible: “Artifacts are not tied to situations but to individual performances” (Hogan, 2010, p383). So for example, social media users won’t want to post something on their public profile if it might be seen by a work colleague and considered incongruous with their professional identity. Online exhibitional performances are therefore mediated by a ‘lowest common denominator’ of what is acceptable across all audiences. This is also something we’ve had to learn as we adapt to being social on social media. 

There are so many examples of people who have been found to have posted content years ago when their social network was smaller or closer, and most people of my generation will know that early social media was awash with stuff that would be considered completely unacceptable now. So what’s changed? Is it that the collapsing of our social networks mean we default to presenting the least obnoxious version of ourselves? Have social media platforms, or our understanding of them, developed so we feel less comfortable being our true selves online? Or has the presence of social media in our lives quite literally changed us by affecting our identities? 

I would argue that it’s a bit of each of these, but for young people growing up with social media I think the last one is the most significant. A consequence of the way young people interact with social media is that social media as a structure becomes active in the construction of new identities; young people become online. Concerns over this have prompted the European Commision to launch proceedings (European Commission, 2024) investigating Meta’s potential infringement of the Digital Services Act, and it’s something I’m looking forward to writing about next time, through the use of Stuart Hall’s ideas on the process of becoming and his theory of representation.

 

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European Commission (2024) Commission opens formal proceedings against Meta under the Digital Services Act related to the protection of minors on Facebook and Instagram [Press Release]  ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_2664

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Rhodes, S. C. (2022). Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Fake News: How Social Media Conditions Individuals to Be Less Critical of Political Misinformation. Political Communication, 39(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2021.1910887

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