Student Name
Title : Changing Personas
Institution
Changing Personas
Much has been discussed on how individuals engage in dynamic personalities to fit in and manage perception, specifically on face to face interactions. Face-to-face interaction of even the simplest sort is a far more socially intricate operation than we generally recognize. It is rife with unacknowledged rituals, tacit understandings, covert symbolic exchanges, impression management techniques, and calculated strategic manoeuvrings. Scholar like Erving Goffman have attempted to study this human trait , on his trip to the Shetland Islands in the 1950s to do fieldwork on the social structure of the island community for his PhD dissertation. However, he found that the complex interpersonal relationships in the hotel he stayed at to be a much richer site for social study. The theories that became the basis for his dramaturgical approach in The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959) developed from his detailed observations of the elaborate “interaction rituals” in everyday social interaction.
People always try to control the general persona impression they make on others in social encounters depending on person engaged. They want to be received well. They want to be taken as credible. At the same time, the others are interested in checking up on the persona’s sincerity, trustworthiness and general suitability as someone worth spending time with. In face-to-face encounters in “real time,” they might not have access to information from the person’s background. So in the absence of confirming or disconfirming information that the person is as they claim, they compare what the person intentionally expresses about themselves against other expressions that the person unintentionally “gives off”: facial expressions, mannerisms, gestures, nervousness, quality of clothing, application of make-up, use of language and so on. This dynamic between a person’s self-presentation and the audience’s critical discernment sets in motion a number of micro-level structures that govern the course of social interactions no matter their specific content.
In his essay “On Face-Work,” Goffman (1972) suggests that individuals in any social encounter attempt to establish and act out a line, not unlike the pick-up line a suitor might try out on a potential companion in a bar. The line the individual adopts in any social encounter expresses their view of the situation, their attitude towards the other members of the group, and especially, their attitude towards themselves. Consciously or unconsciously, they decide what “line” they are going to take to respond to the situation. Their line might be, “I’ve been down on my luck, can you help me out?” or “I know more about wine than that guy, so I’m going to let him know it” or “I am really polite so I am not going to say directly that the dress does nothing for her,” etc. As a result of this line, they present a certain face to the group that Goffman describes as a claim to a “positive social value” for themselves.
Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes–albeit an image that others may share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or religion by making a good showing for himself (Goffman, 1972). They present themselves as humble, sincere, knowledgeable, decisive, aggressive, or easy-going, depending on the circumstances and the nature of the social crowd present. Goffman remarks that whether they intentionally take a specific line or present a specific face, or not, they will find that the others assume they have done so and will act towards them accordingly. Therefore, the dynamics of social encounters play out based on whether an individual is successful in his or her bid to “maintain face” or whether they make a gaff or do something that inadvertently interrupts their performance.
Strangely, one’s “face”—essentially positive social attributes one claims for oneself in any situation, but also one’s actual face (its expressiveness, nonverbal cues, potential for betrayal)—does not really belong to the individual. A person may be said to have, or be in or maintain face when the line he effectively takes presents an image of him that is internally consistent, that is supported by judgments and evidence conveyed by other participants, and that is confirmed by evidence conveyed through impersonal agencies in the situation. At such times the person’s face clearly is something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter and becomes manifest only when these events are read and interpreted for the appraisals expressed in them. (1972, pp. 6–7)
Social interaction is in crucial respects symbolic interaction–interaction which is mediated by the exchange and interpretation of symbols. In symbolic interaction, people contrive to reach a mutual understanding of each other and of the tasks at hand through the exchange and interpretation of symbols. Only on this basis can a coordinated action be accomplished. The process of communication is the central quality of the human social environment. Social interaction depends on communication. George Herbert Mead (1934) argues that we often act as if an idea we have “in our head” defines who we are and what the situation in front of us is. But our ideas are in fact nebulous. They have to be confirmed by the others in the situation before they can become “real” or “actual.” Therefore, communication is central to defining social situations. Moreover, it operates primarily based on indications or gestures of meaning that call out responses in others. As Mead puts it, in a somewhat complicated way, “the meaning of a gesture by one organism … is found in the response of another organism to what would be the completion of the act of the first organism which that gesture initiates and indicates” (Mead, 1934).
Situations are not defined in advance, nor are they defined by the isolated understandings of the individuals involved. They are defined by the indications of meaning given by participants and the responses by the others. “Such a response is its meaning, or gives it its meaning” (Mead, 1934). Even the most habitualized situations involve a process of symbolic interaction in which a definition of the situation emerges through a mutual interpretation of signs or indications. Of course, it is impossible to look inside a person’s head and study what role he or she is playing. All we can observe is behaviour, or role performance. Role performance is how a person expresses his or her role; describing it as a “performance” emphasizes that individuals use certain gestures, manners and “routines” to seek to influence others in their enactments of specific roles. In this sense, individuals in social contexts are always performers.
Theatre as an analogy for social interaction, (i.e. dramaturgy in theatre is the art of dramatic composition on stage). Recognizes that people played their roles and engaged in interaction theatrically, often following common social scripts and using props and costumes to support their roles. Therefore, the logic of social situations, whatever their particular content or participants, dictates that it is in the interest of the performer to control the conduct and responses of the others through various defensive strategies or impression management, while it is in the interest of the audience to accommodate the performance as far as is practicable through various protective practices (e.g. tact, wilful ignorance, etc.). As a result, individuals are continually obliged to manage the impression they are making on the others, often using the same type of “props” and “lines” as an actor. Social interactions are governed by preventative practices employed to avoid embarrassments. Moreover, because it can be unclear what part a person may play in a given situation, he or she has to improvise his or her role as the situation unfolds.
Each situation is a new scene, and individuals perform different personas depending on who is present. Nevertheless, the emphasis on symbolic interactionism as a whole, is that the social encounter, and social reality itself, is open and unpredictable. It relies on a continuous process of mutual interpretation, of signs given and signs received. Social reality is not predetermined by structures, functions, roles, or history but often draws on these in the same way actors draw on background knowledge and experience in creating a credible character.
However, the implications of the dramaturgical approach are that one is always playing a role. There is no single self. Even backstage the performer is not necessarily able to be their “true self.” Firstly, role performances are often performed as part of a team “whose intimate cooperation is required if a given projected definition of the situation is to be maintained”–the restaurant staff, the law office, the husband and wife team, etc. Team members are involved with each other in a relationship of reciprocal dependence, because any team member of a team has the power to give away the secrets of the show, and reciprocal familiarity, because team members are all “persons in the know” and not a position to maintain their front before each other. This entails that even backstage they are obliged to demonstrate their allegiance to the team project and play their respective “back stage” roles.
In conclusion its worthy to note that ,the self is on one side “an image pieced together from the expressive implications of the full flow of events in an undertaking,” and on the other, “a kind of player in a ritual game” .The self is essentially a mask. It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role, It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves .
However, individuals are completely inauthentic or phony. In so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves—the role we are striving to live up to—this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be.
References
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Goffman, E. (1972). On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. In Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behaviour (pp. 5–45). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
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Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society, (Vol. 111). C. W. Morris (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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