Image Credit – Alan Cleaver – http://www.flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/
Not too much has been happening with myself today so I am going to talk about a more serious topic. As you may have read from the side I majored in sociology, and if you read my blog you know that I get paid to do social media. I pretty much view sociologists as professional people watchers and studiers. I honestly believe that the field had died for a while, but now with the rise of social media I believe that many of the topics and theories dealing with the field can be tested and analyzed. However, today I am going to talk about people’s front stage, back stage, and how these concepts relate to social media.
The concepts of front stage and back stage stem from Dramaturgy; a sociological perspective that comes from symbolic interactionism. Symbolic interactionism is a sociological perspective that emphasizes micro-scale social interaction. The Dramaturgical perspective was brought to light by a man named Erving Goffman and is fleshed out in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The basic argument of dramaturgical sociology is that people act certain ways based on the time, place, and audience. For example, you act different at the bar than you do at an important business meeting. Another example is that you act different in a classroom than you would while at a sporting event.
