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March 9, 2005

Goffman and Post applied to blogging

Goffman, Erving. 1959. "Introduction" and "Performances" from The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday: New York.

Post, Robert. 2002. Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law. Duke University Press.

This entry is me applying these two pieces to four examples of blogging for my Performance Studies class. The voice is intended towards them and some of the talk was removed for privacy reasons.

Goffman

Blogging is often conceptualized as a form of textual production – metaphorically, diarying or journalism. Yet, i have found that many bloggers conceive of their practice as a presentation of self in digital life. Given this, Goffman can help us unpack what is going on in blogging. For the sake of focus, i am going to take it as a given that we all agree that a blog is not simply textual output, but identity production. A blog can be seen as a form of a body online and the text should be read as digitally-embodied performance where the constant stream of output alters the self and the presentation, adding new layers of skin that continually add to the representation.

I want to begin by explaining certain aspects of blogging, situated in Goffman's terms and approach. The blog itself is a 'face' where bloggers project a definition of the situation. In blogging, the blogger defines the stage of the performance as well as construct the performance itself. They create the site, define the terms for the audience, set the lights and determine the boundaries. The individual blogger has extensive influence over the definition of the situation (6). Given this control, Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor can be directly applicable to this form of performance. Yet, the distinction between actor and audience is more explicit than in physical performance – the audience's presence is only visible through page hits and commentary. The lurkers are not visible, the silent rustle of reaction is not audible.

Goffman argues, "fronts tend to be selected, not created" (28). Bloggers most certainly choose the front that they wish to project. Jane, for example, has chosen to present the angsty side of her personality and is often concerned that people who don't know her might get the wrong impression if they just read her blog. That said, the idea that there is an established social role (27) for a blogger may now be true, but wasn't always. In its inception, the role of the blogger was unestablished in society. Bloggers established a new social role, metaphorically drawing extensively from known and established social roles – such as that of the journalist. In the past couple of years, as the assumptions drawn from these metaphors have been contested, the social role of the blogger is in disarray. Consider, for example, the current EFF vs. Apple lawsuit over whether or not a blogger is a journalist and can have the right to journalists' privileges. Or consider the bloggers who thought they were only blogging for friends but found out that a friends-only face is not appropriate in a publicly searchable and archived forum.

One challenge in interpreting Goffman is that his only conception of social interaction is in a face-to-face context. The advantage of such an unmediated environment is that the audience is always known, whether it is individuals or groups of people. Blogging, on the other hand, requires the blogger to envision their audience and negotiate it without any feedback as to who is actually listening. This requires a highly nuanced maintenance of expression, particularly when the blogger wants to make different statements to different groups of people. In other words, there are layers of front and back stages and the blogger is constantly managing access through intentionally constructed speech.

Even in the last week, my blog is filled with such layered references. The reference to Bosley, which you probably didn't think twice about, is explicitly targeted at my friend A and her advisor P – they did not miss this at all. The Bunny of the Month club was an explicit joke to my friend G, referencing a dead bunnies joke that pervaded our trip to Tokyo. Fuck SMS.ac was in order to aggravate that company, all the meanwhile telling people not to use their service and making a public statement of support for my friend Joi. And, of course, clouds begin to pass is the documentation of X's crises in very coded terms. All have varying layers of references – you probably realized that this was about X, but most of my 1000+ readers did not.

There are layers and layers of performance going on here, some of which are discernable to mass audiences, others of which have little or no value to anyone outside of the small niche of friends and folks who are just like the blogger. Consider, for example, the different audience targets of AznGirl and BoingBoing. To those who are close to the authors of BoingBoing, the purportedly news-like entries contain a lot of information about the author's moods, daily activities, debates, etc. The difference is that the backstage is very far from the frontstage while for AznGirl, there's a much more accessible connection.

Unlike most speech acts, blog entries are often more crafted. Of course, whether they are speech or text in Ong's terms is still up for debate. That said, blog entries are typically written in an explosion of text with zero review, rants like the ones often espoused by their authors in everyday speech. Once posted, they are rarely edited and edits are typically marked with things like "update." Yet, even through blog entries are more carefully crafted than the typical speech act, involuntary information often seeps through. Blog expressions have the same form of given and given off sign activity that dominates physical expressions. What is given is speech in the most narrow of senses – the actual text and images of posts, the coloring and templating of the page. Yet, material is also given off. At the highest level, the domain name has significance, the page hit counters tell viewers about audience and the comments reveal aspects of the bloggers' speech that may not be otherwise viewable. More deeply, the tone and formulation is often conveying information about the speaker that is not part of what is intentionally given, often because the audience is different than the intended audience.

Yet, while some material is clearly given off, many of the types of given off material to which we are accustomed in everyday life are not available in digital life. The embodied cues that often accompany vocal performance, such as clothing, hand gestures, facial expression and voice tones are not present in blogs. While we can negotiate these things consciously, creating intentionally given cues, there are also aspects of these that are given off – things that we don't realize we do but that aide in our performance. Bloggers often use more descriptive terms and smiley faces to adjust for given signals, but the unconscious signals given off that they are accustomed to accommodating for are not there. This results in a form of misinformation. Consider what happens when bloggers write about communities to which they are a part – racial communities, gender and sexuality communities, etc. Without the cues to identify the blogger as part of that community, those posts are often read as prejudicial. Whether or not there is inwardly-directed prejudice is debatable, but this is often a shock for the blogger who assumes that their embodied identity is visible and part of the dialogue – given off information that is forgotten to be explicitly performed. In this sense, while the blog may be a digital body, that digital body has very different properties than the one that we embody everyday.

Different types of misinformation exist throughout blogging. Some of this is deceptive, such as my posts indicating that i am not checking email. This is intentionally constructed to discourage my readers from sending me email. Jane's constant whining is also a form of misinformation by giving the reader the impression that this is who Jane is, rather than indicating that this is only one facet of her reality.

This reading of misinformation stems from the difficulty in distinguishing what constitutes a performance. For Goffman, a performance is "defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants" (15). From the blogger's perspective, a blog post is the most obvious delimiter of a performance, but from the audience's perspective, the front page of a blog might be viewed as a continuous performance. Another challenge stems from Goffman's definition of an interaction as "all the interaction which occurs throughout any one occasion when a given set of individuals are in one another's continuous presence" (15). Aside from the complicated notion of presence that is at play in blogging, the relative lack of access between audience members makes it difficult to describe inter-relations between audience members. The same performance, while performed for a wide audience through one performance act by the blogger is not temporarily read simultaneously by the audience members. Furthermore, their interactions with the performance are multi-modal and often not accessible to other audience members. Common practice dictates that responses come in physical space, via AIM or email, via trackbacks, via comments or through a set of unreadable facial reactions that are not even accessible to the performer.

In discussing the maintenance of a front, Goffman separates between appearance and manner (24). Although there is certainly appearance to blogs, the signals given here are hardly the signals one is accustomed to in everyday life – age, sex, race, clothing, facial expressions, etc. The emphasis is on the manner, or the ways in which the information is conveyed. A blog's appearance can be eliminated by newsreaders that allow the viewer to alter the color, font and adorning information. More importantly, a blog's appearance is rarely modified and ends up not having the significant weight as in everyday life. As such, the manner of a front is far more central to the performance.

Post

With the lack of proper "appearance" in mind, i now want to turn to Post. Since the earliest days of cyberculture, there was a utopian/dystopian rhetoric that you could finally be free of the constraints of the body. Gender, race, class, and appearance – none of these would matter because no one knows you're a dog online. Furious about this, Amy Bruckman created a project called "The Turing Game" where people declared identity information like "gender" and then everyone had to figure out whose bodies matched their speech using a form of 20 questions like "How much toilet paper do you use a month?" Much to everyone's surprise, most people could determine who was being deceptive within a few rounds. Since then, extensive work has been done to show that embodied identity information "seeps through" online. In other words, appearance affects identity at a core.

While this work is fairly extensive in STS and cyberculture studies, blogging rhetoric reflects antiquated ideas that free access means that blogging is equalizing and democratic. This was excessively highlighted during the war and election when bloggers became tropes for democratic journalism. Of course, the vast majority of bloggers that are identified as journalistic bloggers are straight white men from the same educational and class backgrounds as most journalists and the topics and geographic regions that they cover are statistically no different than those of mainstream media (Zuckerman).

Although bloggers' audiences may not be able to easily decipher the physical appearance of a given blogger unless a photo is present, most regular readers quickly determine prominent identity features through extended access to the manners and form of the textual output. Some information may also be available in profiles, bios and in the name the blogger chooses to adopt. Stereotypes are often built based on attributes derived from the text. For example, AznGirl's alternate capitalization is stereotypically associated with Asian-identified individuals in their teens and early 20s.

The concept of equality in blogging stems from the same logic as in the blind orchestra audition in Post's account. Post notes that such blindness is supposed to counteract gender discrimination because it is assumed that quality of musicianship is inherently ungendered. Likewise, the blogging as textual production is assumed to be ungendered, unraced, unsexualized. Not only is this not the case, most bloggers are not trying to transcend these identity markers – they are simply trying to be themselves and who they are is very much gendered, raced and sexualized.

Audience in blogging is primarily built through social networks, which are notoriously homogenizing. If blogging were truly blind, blogrolls, or the list of blogs that a person reads would be diverse. Yet, in all of my research, blogrolls tend to replicate the same homogenous tendencies as other social networks – black bloggers have blogrolls with other black bloggers, women are rarely included in the blogrolls of men, etc.

In responding to Post, Appiah points out that another conflation of the legal argument is that equality and sameness are interchangeable. What makes the body so visible in blogging has to do with the fact that appearance has become central to the person, central to their identity. Culture is gendered, raced and sexualized. Given the deeply rooted differences based on experience, there is no such thing as sameness. Conceptualizing equality from there is foolish.

The assumption in anti-discrimination law is that people can transcend bodily appearances to truly 'see' more salient, meaningful qualities about a person. Yet, in blogging, where the even bodily appearances are not directly visible, readers do not transcend bodily appearances. They are embedded in the text, in the production of self. Given this form of 'blindness' is such transcendence even possible?

With only digital bodies to perform, one might assume that bodily appearances would not matter. Yet, as Post notes "the presentation of appearances in everyday life is not merely a matter of the external surfaces of the self, for appearances are also connected to identity" (3). Butler affirms this, stating that "The person is and is not, centrally, his or her appearance" but then asks "Where do we go from here?" (74)

In building bridges between blogging and Goffman/Post, my goal is simply to highlight that these issues emerge even outside of the bodied realities that we all take for granted. The embodied nature of digital presentation of self may not look like the one in which we are accustomed, but it helps highlight how deeply appearances operate and how important the management of performance continues to be.


Category: blogging

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