With a simple look at the posts of your friends or followers on social networks such as Facebook or Instagram, we can see the way in which people reflect their life and personality through the photos and videos they upload.
However, in these networks there are no signs of suffering, hardship or sadness in the profiles of any of their 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 their profile on social networks? Can these virtual platforms tell us what people are really like?
This market of samples of happiness that we find every time we open social networks can be seen from one of the great theories of personality, the one developed by the sociologist and writer, Erving Goffman.
Erving Goffman and the personality created by interactions
This author develops his work around the creation of personality through interactions with others. He argues that much of our behavior depends on interpersonal scenarios and usually takes the forms of what we want to achieve and what interests us from our interlocutors. It is about 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 acts through interactions with others.
From this theory, interaction would consist of creating impressions that allow us to form inferences that benefit us and that reflect the intentions and aspects of our own identity that we want to communicate, making the relationship with others a continuous management of public image, a successive series of self-presentations.
Goffman theory and social networks
Currently, 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 of creating a positive image about others to obtain benefits for our own followers. But not only that would serve to sell our public image, but also each of the interactions we carry out on a daily basis.
The meeting with the baker when buying bread, the daily coffee with co-workers, the date with that person a friend introduced you to… 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 interpret in each interaction with the objective of obtaining benefits and, above all, of being welcomed by society.
Goffman insists that such a game of representations never transmits the real identity, but the wanted identity, therefore, human behavior is characterized by the techniques of advertising, marketing and interpretation, which is why Goffman’s model reflects the importance of negotiation as a form of social interaction
It is easy to conclude that this is a somewhat Machiavellian theory of identity 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 take them into account.
At least, to make us aware that The person behind that Instagram account may be far from the person they really are
