Erving Goffman's theory of social action

With a simple glance at the publications of your friends or followers in social networks like Facebook or Instagram, we can see the way in which people reflect their life and their personality through the photos and videos that they upload.

However, in these networks there are no signs of suffering, hardship or sadness in the profiles of any of its members. We see a multitude of photos of happy faces, landscapes, smiles, phrases of improvement; and yet there is no room for a reality as overwhelming and certain as the existence of human pain and suffering in the life of each person.

What do we really know about others when we see your profile on social media? Can these virtual platforms tell us what people really are like?

This market of the samples of happiness that we find every time you open social networks, can be seen from one of the great theories of personality, that developed by the sociologist and writer, Erving Goffman.

Erving Goffman and the personality created by interactions

This author develops his work around the 

personality creation through interactions with others. He defends that a large part of our behavior depends on interpersonal scenarios and usually takes the forms of what we want to achieve and what interests us in our interlocutors. It is about a constant management of our image before others.

According to Goffman, interaction is always about defining the situation in a way that allows us to gain control over the impressions that others form of us. From this perspective, the best definition that corresponds to the person is that of an actor who plays a role and that he acts through interactions with others.

From this theory, the interaction would consist of creating impressions that allow us to form inferences that benefit us and that reflect the intentions and aspects of the own identity that we want to communicate, making of the relationship with others a continuous management of the public image, a successive series of self-presentations.

Goffman's theory and social networks

At present these self-presentations could be each of the photos and videos that we send to all those who follow us on social networks, as a way to create a positive image about others to obtain benefits over their own followers. But not only that would serve to sell our public image, but also each of the interactions we carry out on a day-to-day basis.

The meeting with the baker when buying bread, the daily coffee with the coworkers, the appointment with the person that a friend introduced you... Any of these scenarios involves the creation of impressions And, depending on your interpretation, the people you interact with will impose one personality or another on you.

From this perspective, identity is the subject's way of presenting himself based on the advantages and disadvantages of the subject's possible multiple identities at a given moment. In short, Goffman's theory of social action would explain a set of roles that we will interpreting in each interaction with the aim of obtaining benefits and, above all, of being welcomed by the society.

Goffman insists that such a play of representations never transmits the real identity, but the identity My dear, therefore, human behavior is characterized by the techniques of advertising, marketing and interpretation, so that Goffman's model reflects the importance of negotiation as a form of social interaction.

The public image market

It is easy to conclude that it is a somewhat Machiavellian identity theory based on the superficial, the aesthetic and the false. However, the similarities of this author's conclusions with the world of social networks and personal treatment, in which there is no room for suffering and misfortune but everything is hidden behind the products of a supermarket of happiness, appearances and aesthetics, they are very real and it is necessary to have them in account.

At least, to make us aware that the person behind that Instagram account may be very different from the person they really are.