Dramaturgy

This week’s topic is Dramaturgy, which happens to be the topic my group will be presenting on during this weeks tutorial. I did at first dread the idea of attempting to read the 50 page Goffman reading, but the further I read the more interested I became! Dramaturgy was a term I had never come across before, but through Goffman’s reading and Andy’s lecture I realised how much of our world is revolved around dramaturgy. The concept of social life being a drama and game explains that every interaction is a performance and that life is a massive stage.

Both Andy and Goffman mention that the deliverer of the interaction bases its response on how they expect the audience to receive and understand the performance. This suggests that the performer of every interaction considers what is the ‘norm’ ways of communicating and therefore individuals perform in a way to leave a good impression. Thinking about my own interactions with people, I definitely alter the way I speak to fit certain situations in order to leave a lasting good impression. Throughout an interaction I find myself alternating from what Goffman calls “backstage” to “frontstage”, where in backstage I prepare myself for the delivery of my performance onto the frontstage. Every time an interaction begins to drift into a different direction, I can recall myself going backstage in order to regroup my thoughts so that I can perform and keep face frontstage.

Goffman also mentions two types of performances, “cynical” and “sincere”. A "cynical" performer is one who does not believe in their delivery but performs the way they do in order to save face and conform to the ideal ways of society. A "sincere" performer is one who truly believes in the actions that they are performing. An example to explain this that I came up with for our presentation was The Truman Show. The actors within the tv show were all cynical performers, whereas Truman himself (who was oblivious to his life being an actual drama) was a sincere performer.

Overall, I found Dramaturgy an interesting topic to cover and found it a great topic to do our group presentation on. Also, here is the link to the powerpoint slides that Zac, Lee and myself prepared for our presentation:

SOC250: Dramaturgy; Zac, Lee & Julia

Presentation of Self

As we all should know this week we’re talking about the presentation of self. We dabbled into the topic through the two readings by Goffman as well as Andy’s lecture. From what I gathered was that the presentation of self involved various ways we portray ourselves depending on the type of social interaction. I found that Goffman’s “The nature of Deference and Demeanor” seemed to ramble on, which made it difficult to actually understand the point to his theory. Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe that Deference relates to the unwritten laws within society which influences our behaviour towards superiors while Demeanor allows the individual to present themselves in a way they want to be perceived.

What I found interesting was the idea of how the rules of society were created. The way in which the world’s population has somehow developed these procedures through observation and behaviours is mind boggling. Also, how these rules of conduct seem to just come to us naturally without needing to think about it, which in the end dictates how we want to present ourselves within society.

Facework was also an aspect of Goffman’s theory that grabbed my attention. Andy’s attempt at explaining “losing face” and “saving face” really opened my eyes to how cautious we are about keeping our dignity intact when interacting with other people. The first thing that came to mind when thinking of facework is an example from one of the greatest movies of all time…MEAN GIRLS! When Cady wants to join the Mathletes, her overly flamboyant friend Damian attempts to save Cady’s face by blurting out “you can’t join Mathletes, that’s social suicide!” I think it’s funny that not only do we feel the need to save our own faces but the faces of our friends as well, in order for their embarrassing moment not to reflect upon how we want to present ourselves. So in other words, Goffman has kind of made me realise how conceited we can be sometimes!

Anyway, to wrap this up I thought I would leave you with an insight into Gretchen Wieners’  code of conduct. 

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