Taking Shakespeare’s statement seriously, Goffman presents a dramaturgical model of human life and uses it as the conceptual framework for understanding life-in-society. Goffman’s “The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” suggests that people are like actors in a play when interacting. We wear different clothes in different situations which are the costumes and scenes. We adjust the props that we’re going to have in a particular situation. Our manners also change depending on who we interact with. We do all of this to make a good impression on the people we interact with. Taking Shakespeare’s statement seriously, Goffman presents a dramaturgical model of human life and uses it as the conceptual framework for understanding life-in-society. Similarly, if the individual offers the others a product or service, they will often find that during the interaction there will be no time and place immediately available for eating the pudding that the proof can be found in. They will be forced to accept some events as conventional or natural signs of something not directly available to the senses. The expressiveness of the individual appears to involve two radically different kinds of sign activity: the expression that he gives, and the expression that he gives off.
Goffman’s idea pretty much proposes that there are no real us. We constantly act like performers on a stage when interacting. There’s also what he calls the front stage and backstage behavior. Front stage behavior is what we show to the public that makes us look good, while backstage behavior is the behavior closer to our real selves. Imagine as if you’re in the front stage, people are watching you (audience), so you act in the best way possible so you can impress them. On the other hand, when you’re backstage, there’s no audience, so you don’t really act to impress. The individual does of course intentionally convey misinformation by means of both of these types of communication, the first involving deceit. Taking communication in both its narrow and broad sense, one finds that when the individual is in the immediate presence of others, his activity will have a promissory character. When the interaction that is initiated by “first impressions” is itself merely the initial interaction in an extended series of interactions involving the same participants, we speak of “getting off on the right foot” and feel that it is crucial that we do so. In consequence, when an individual projects a definition of the situation and thereby makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind, he automatically exerts a moral demand upon the others, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect.
Socially Loco 