Self-Presentation in Ligth of Facebook

Inspired by some work presented at IWQoS dealing with social networks and small world characteristics, I zoned out and was wondering whether someone did some analysis of Facebook and e.g. proofed the six degrees of separation assumption stated by Milgram. In 2006, an analysis of one million profiles of the German Facebook clone StudiVZ were presented in [0]. The findings provide interesting insights into StudiVZ, but the presented evaluation does not consider an extensive social network analysis. As the amount of users on Facebook is much higher than on StudiVZ and — from an international perspective — Facebook is more widely known, I would expect more work dealing with Facebook that gives more interesting insights into today’s social networks.

A student work presented at the University of Oslo by Sasan Zarghooni [1] focuses on self-presentation management on Facebook. Self-presentation management is understood as the management of the impression a person makes on other people. An introduction of the classical theory proposed by Goffman [2] is followed by a discussion aiming to show whether this theory can explain the self-representational behaviour observed on Facebook.

Goffman introduced a dramaturgical approach in [2], where he compared self-presentation to stage acting. An actor plays a role for a specific audience in a front stage area and retreats to a backstage, where he will change his behaviour. This concept can be clarified by the example of a teacher acting in an authoritarian manner in an unruly class (front stage), but shows a different behaviour at a family reunion. The concept of front- and backstages helps to understand why people behave differently in different places.

Some findings presented in [1]:

• “The e-mail like messaging system on Facebook allows for backstage interaction, and this way two friends may discuss the darkest secrets of their lives on Facebook without any other friends knowing.”
• A study by Ellison [3] “found that Facebook led to a substantial increase in subjective well-being and self-esteem for shy people (…) because Facebook provides users with better control over how they self-present”
• “It could suggest [A study by Walther [4]] that people consider their pictures to be the most important way of self-presenting: those who perceive themselves photogeneous do not engage heavily in other forms of self-presentation because they have already done a successfull self-presentation, whereas those who consider themselves less attractive wish to compensate”.

The work in [1] clearly states that “the more contacts or friends we have, the stronger is the need to segregate those who receive a particular self-presentation from those who receive another one”. This is the main reason why I believe that the discussion should be detached from a particular medium (e.g. Facebook) to a more macroscopic view. Different social networks provide different stages for different types of roles; business networks such as Xing or LinkedIn are used to manage a business role, whereas Facebook and StudiVZ appear to be more used for managing a role revealed to (closer) friends.

All in all, [1] is a well written student paper which is easy to read and gives a good introduction into Goffman’s theory of self-presentation.

[0] StudiVZ analysis

[1] Sasan Zarghooni, “A Study of Self-Presentation in Light of Facebook“, University of Oslo, 2007

[2] Goffman, E: “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, 1982