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(Eco 1997,107-117)
Introduction
In the new public spaces of the digital social platforms, people more and more often
observes “while they are being creative and productive” at the same time “they spy
and they are being spied” (Dragona 2017). Inside a social media environment people
often make friends, share opinions and sometimes try to find common points of
reference. Most of the time they participate in networks such as YouTube, Facebook
in order to “share beliefs and experiences, to communicate and connect and – above
It is clear from the beginning that social media can be a potential space for
psychology, and theatre and performance studies, and often has been related to the
I will focus on the notions of ‘performance’ as they are given by both Erving
Goffman and Umberto Eco who recognize to it the potential of conscious choices of
Concerning these two notions, my aim in this paper is to reflect upon the
characteristic features that can make our participation in social media to be considered
as performative. To this end, I will divide the text in two parts. In the first part I will
attempt to make a brief reference to what, according to Ruth E. Page, are the main
will try to explain how the notions of Goffman and Eco about ‘performance’ can be
applied in such environments. In the second part, I will attempt to make a more
specific map that will describe how the structure of social media can transform the
The social web, commonly known as web 2.0, began to develop itself in the decade of
1990, and social media became mainstream internet activities in the first decade of the
21th century. As Ruth E. Page notifies in her book Stories and Social Media
“examples of social media include (but are not limited to) discussion forums, blogs,
wikis, podcasting, social network sites, video sharing and microblogging” (Page
2012).
In the same book she attempts to provide some of the main characteristic
other. She underlines “they are experienced not as isolated pages but more as shared
spaces that enable collective contributions in the form of content, comment and edits”
(Page 2012). She defines them as “dialogic” because their collaborative nature makes
them the ideal space for dialogue. Then, she refers to them as “emergent” because
over time and draw attention to the processes of storytelling, rather than focusing on a
discrete narrative product”. Finally, she argues that they are “personalized” and
“context-rich” because they are designed in such a way that the process of consuming
and producing social media can be personalized on the one hand, while on the other
In his book The Presentation Of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman defines
performance as “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked
by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some
influence on the observers”. According to this notion, performance seems to have the
place “before a particular set of observers”) and interacting (what the actor does “has
some influence on the observers”), but in his book, Goffman seems to imply that the
actor is also influenced by the presence of the observers. Oxford Dictionaries define
social media as: “Websites and applications that enable users to create and share
It is clear from the beginning that social media are environments which
provoke the user to be an actor who creates content. Moreover, this content has to be
shared, which means that social media demand the presence of an audience and thus
also demands engaging and interacting, as the users are inside the network as long as
they are digitally present, and as in order to be present they have to interact with other
users inside the digital environment. It seems that, according to Goffman, social
Some years later, in his article “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,” gives his own
objects, inserted within a physical space, stands for something else to a reacting
audience. In order to do so, it has been framed within a sort of performative situation
that establishes that it has to be taken as a sign. From this moment on, the curtain is
(“human body”) and refers strictly to the analogue world (“physical space”).
However, I found many common characteristics between the way Eco describes the
function of a performance and the way that social media environments function. This
is the reason why I will attempt to transfer Eco’s notion in the digital world of social
I will begin with the notion of “space” in Eco’s definition in order to elaborate.
understood in terms of bits and bytes. Everything that gets in this space needs to be
translated into a digital code, which includes the “human body”, its “recognizable
properties”, the “sets of objects” with which it is surrounded or supplied, and the
“reacting audience”. In the digital space of social media, the “human body” is
translated to a personal page or a personal account which can be seen from a selected
group of users. This page or account belongs to the individual user and its content
could be considered as its “recognizable properties”, since the content identifies the
surrounded by a set of digital graphics and supplied with a set of applications which
can both be considered as a set of objects that enable the user to design his/her page
and also to interact with other users. Later on in this paper, I will explain the function
of these applications and the potential that it gives the user in order to express him-
/herself. Finally, the “reacting audience”, as has already been mentioned, is translated
to a group of other users, who can interact through their personal page by using the
We have already seen how the analogue characteristics in Umberto Eco’s notion can
be translated to the digital space of social media. It remains to see how the
“performative situation that establishes that it (the body) has to be taken as a sign” can
user “standing for something else in front of a reacting audience”. Firstly, I am going
to describe what “performative situation” means, after which I will attempt to explain
and events are shown by – and, as a result, function as –intentional signs (Eco 1977,
117) in the perspective of (a) possible world(s) or situation(s)” (Kattenbelt 2010, 30).
to conclude that “the performed objects, bodies, actions and events are disposed of
their contingency” (Kattenbelt 2010, 30). Concerning this line of thinking I could
observe that social media are much related to the notions of ‘sign’ and ‘contingency’.
Their function is based on a network model, which means that inside a social media
provides a large set of possible events or circumstances. Their existence itself depends
on a language which consists of digital signs and thus everything that happens inside
their space is designed to be shown according to these intentional signs. That means
upon the characteristic features that make our participation in social media to be
The stage
As Bernie Hogan observes in his article “The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social
Media”, social media environments can be conceived as exhibition spaces, as they “do
not depend on being bounded in space and time with continued observation occurring
between individuals” (Hogan 2017). He emphasizes that social media have the
following features:
third party for distribution, the submitter does not continually monitor these data as an
audience is receiving it, and may possibly never fully know the audience. (Hogan
2017)
Although he relates the features above to the structure of an exhibition space,
I would like to add that these could also be sufficient components of a performance
process. In this line of thinking, I would take a chance to describe social media as a
continually operating exhibition space which can easily host a great amount of both
artworks and performances which are available to the audience any time their creators
The audience
Social media demands an active audience and the boundaries between the performers
and the audience are very thin. As part of the audience the user can respond, evaluate,
and share his opinion or write any comment about the performance in which has been
addressed. But how can the audience approach a performance? As Hogan explains
“Sharing artifacts online is often done through ‘friends’. As such, people add many
friends to their online profile in order to participate in these sites fully. Curators use
this list of friends in order to determine how to properly redistribute content” (Hogan
2017). In other words, the audience can approach only the performances that are
related to the platforms or groups they are participants of. The access in these
The “(cyber)performers”
For most users the online self is an extension of their offline self. Laura Robinson
defines the users of cyberspace as “cyberperformers” (she relates this notion more to
Goffman’s theory) and, especially for the users of social media, she underlines their
as name, age, gender and even physical size (Robinson 2017, 106). I would also like
to add in this list the characteristic features of the face, the color of the hair and the
audiovisual material and I could say that they frame the cyber-performing ‘body’. It is
related to their social identity. In this category are included: information such as
profession, hobbies, specific tastes of music, films, arts, food or dressing and every
other information that can somehow define cyberperformers social self. It is clear that
this second category refers to what is called ‘social roles’ which is related from many
that “we are all essentially theatrical beings” (Evreinoff 1927) in a perspective that we
all desire to be ‘different’. In a social media environment, the cyberperformer has the
potential to design exactly who he wants to be, as his/her main profile is been
constructed at the largest scale from what information he/she chooses to show.
However, the most interesting part in this process of showing is the fact that
the cyberperformer has to present him-/herself according to aesthetic terms. The style
he/she chooses to present him-/herself is as much important as the main content of the
video recording, sound recording, text writing) which are supplied with a number of
aesthetic tools (photographic filters, visual effects, sound effects, graphics, emoticons
may have a clean profile on Facebook but a series of lewd pictures on Xtube.com,
ambiguous or even deceptive on Facebook or one’s twitter account, but still have an
2017). It is clear that cyberperformers construct identities that are relative to their
networks, and to achieve that they use different kind of aesthetics each time. In other
words, every composition they make depends on the way they want to address their
The performances
Below I am going to make a list (which can be much more extended) of some of the
environments.
share stories about many different topics. These stories can include “reports of
professional activity, document ongoing stories of personal activity from the narrator’s
private life, even profoundly significant life events and deeply personal emotive topics”
(Page 2012). According to Page, the narrators of these stories can use words, images,
sounds and audiovisual resources like the video published on YouTube and the podcasts
from the archives of the oral history project to communicate their story.
Real time reporting or live streaming: These kinds of actions enable the
Selfies: Selfies are defined as “photographs that one has taken of oneself,
typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media” (English
Oxford Living Dictionary 2017). They are self-portraits which cyberperformers use in
of their presence. The most popular of them are “duck-face”, “morphing” and “tongue-
selfie”.
sentence in their personal page and ask people to finish it in their way. This kind of
action aims to engage the audience in a topic that the cyberperformer is interested in.
media are self-referential and have a multimedia form (as they are a combination of
texts, images and sounds). In order to answer the question if all content can be
ephemeral act and performance as recorded act” (Hogan 2017, 380). He emphasizes
that if “a performance has been recorded, the nature of the performance has altered”
individual, it is no longer related to the specific audience who were present when the
performance took place. Whilst I agree with this concern, I would like to add in this
line that when a user decides to submit his/her recorded performance in a platform,
the submission itself becomes a new performance which addresses the audience of the
platform. Moreover, I would like to argue that the fact that social media automatically
transform every ephemeral performance into a recorded one, can be translated not
performing duration.
Conclusion
This essay did not aim to exhaust all the characteristics that could turn social media
into a digital stage, but was more an effort of mapping this topic. However, in this
primary approach we can already observe that social media environments are directly
Moreover, this interaction occurs in terms of aesthetic signs and this is the main
reason why social media are also related to Eco’s definition of performance. Namely
that it seems that our participation in social media has many similarities to the process
of theatre making and that every user can be at the same time a spectator, a performer,
or even a dramaturge and a director of his/her own articulations. Social media have
made evident, today more than ever, the performative characteristics of our process of
considered as a digital stage where we can examine our tendency to play roles in
order to communicate.
Bibliography
Dragona, Daphne. 2017. "Tag ties and affective spies."Nextnode.net. Accessed November
Eco, Umberto. 1997. "Semiotics of Theatrical Performance." The Drama Review: TDR, 03:
107-117.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/selfie.
English Oxford Living Dictionary. 2017. "Social Media". Accessed November 2, 2017.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/social_media.
Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. USA: Random House.
Hogan, Bernie. 2017. "The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing
Performances and Exhibitions Online." Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30,
Page, Ruth E. 2012. Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction. New York:
Routledge.
Robinson, Laura. 2007. "The cyberself: the self-ing project goes online, symbolic interaction
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444807072216.