Tagged: Erving Goffman

Social Movements / Social Change

Goffman and the Web

  Despite writing in an era that predated many of the digital communication technologies that have become important to us, Erving Goffman’s analyses of social behaviour and interaction may be useful for understanding digital phenomena.  Recently there has been a resurgence of  Goffman’s ideas within web and digital communication research, notably from the Presentation of self in everyday life (1959).  This article draws on recent work which has applied Goffman’s ideas to the digital field to suggest how his work...

Class & Stratification / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

Social Media: Documentation as Stratification

The new norms of exhibitionism and copious self-documentation have been regular talking points on Sociology Lens over the past year.  Consider Nathan Jurgenson’s posts, our digital culture of narcissism and facebook, youtube, twitter: mass exhibitionism online, as well as my own recent post, The Queer Politics of Chatroulette. It now seems truer than ever for many social media users (particularly, teenagers and young adults) that “If you’re not on MySpace [and/or other social media sites], you don’t exist.” Moreover, the...