Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life Erving Goffman Analysis

“Presentation of self in Everyday Life” written by Erving Goffman is, as the title mentions, about the presentation or the way people express themselves to others in everyday life. Goffman argues and explains that we have different impressions on different people and we behave differently in font of different people. The book explains every aspect of behavior and character representation in everyday life in front of different people that we come across in everyday lives, and the importance of impression management in front of our audience we tend to maintain the same impression that we started off with in front of our audience and it changes with every person we meet. The book starts off with the introduction that gives the readers a rough …show more content…
One such example of everyday application in our lives is the concept that Goffman describes as “front stage and back stage”. Every day, we come across many people, be it work or school, we always show our true back stage face to our closest mates. Front stage is the stage where we play the roles of being in the most professional and desirable form, while our true self is masked layers beneath the face through which only the people in the backstage can penetrate. I can excellently relate to this situation. During my summer job at Office Depot, my supervisor was extremely friendly to all the customers and she was always the one desired behind the counter. Customers would wait in line to be served by her, since they had a friendly impression of her and she always maintained it, since it was the “front stage of her performance”. She was, however, never the same with any of us employees. We could see what troubles she would go through each day and she would openly state her frustrations about the job to us in the “backstage”. Another one of Goffman’s arguments that we can relate to personal lives to this date is appearance. We ‘dress to impress’ in interviews and parties to communicate a high social status to others. We end up spending so much money on getting our makeover, accessories, and clothing for wedding parties, so that we can make others perceive of ourselves as …show more content…
However, in the recent years many other authors have written content that express contradicting opinions on the ideology of Goffman’s theory on sociological interaction and impression management. One such reading from where I drew a different argument is from “Introduction to Sociology” by Anthony Giddens. This in part may be due to the time that Goffman’s book was written was before the evolution of technology, and Giddens believes that the evolution of technology has influenced the patterns of social interaction hat are different from that of Goffman’s theory. One such example is today’s online interaction. Online interaction has minimized facial interactions, thus minimizing the impact of the “appearance” argument for interactions. These days we communicate via electronic media where the means of our social interaction have changed. Earlier we would rely on facial and voice gestures for “micro sociological” signals. These days we rely more on the words and the style of writing that defines people’s emotions and attitudes towards us. We are far more ideal to the online world than we are to the real world. Another interesting contrast to Goffman’s theory was that Goffman relied more on theoretical forms of sociological observation, such as presenting different theoretical situations and