Twitter As Performance

Tweeting isn't as easy as some would have us believe. It takes the creation of an entirely new self to present to the online world.

People who disdain Twitter tend to assume that its users are too lazy to formulate a substantive statement, so they do the easy thing: they burp out little textual emissions whenever something pops into their usually vacant heads.

Many defenders of Twitter resent the suggestion that it's trivial. I mostly resent the suggestion that it's easy. Tweeting is hard. More broadly, status updates, blogging, presenting a version of yourself for mass consumption online is hard. Part CV, part stand-up routine, part cocktail party patter, online interaction is a gauntlet – especially for introverts. Indeed, despite suggestions in the 1990s that the internet might be a place where the shy, awkward, and unattractive could share their inner beauty in an egalitarian utopia as blind as justice, it turns out that online self-presentation is in many ways even more fraught than conference mixers and frat parties. (The tip of the iceberg: mistakes last forever and you can’t go home.)

In 1959, the sociologist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In this book and in many articles, Goffman advanced the "dramaturgical" theory of social interaction, which offers theatre as an extended metaphor for social life. Like theatre, social interaction involves performers and audiences. But unlike in the theatre, the performers and the audience regularly switch roles, taking turns speaking and listening, watching and being watched. Like theatre, social life involves various forms of dishonesty: we self-censor, we attempt to present appropriate and coherent selves to others, and we affirm the socially appropriate selves that others offer to us.

Goffman's dramaturgical account of the contagious nature of embarrassment is instructive. When someone makes a social error, he argues, you feel embarrassed not just out of empathy, but because another actor in your play has disrupted the whole show, compromising not only his identity, but yours too. Goffman describes the embarrassed person in the group: "He is present with them but he is not 'in play.' The others may be forced to turn their attention to the impediment; the topic of conversation is neglected, and energies are directed to the task of reestablishing the flustered individual, of studiously ignoring him, or of withdrawing from his presence." In this model, restoring (or abandoning) the embarrassed person is an act of self-preservation; I have seen the loser and it is us.

How is Goffman's dramaturgical model related to the anxiety certain delicate creatures feel when they tweet? Goffman assumes, reasonably in my view, that our identities are entangled. When we interact, we don’t just play to other discrete organisms, we become part of a larger beast with a life of its own; a good gathering has its own secret, unreplicable recipe, its own magic and momentum. Although the web is supposed to be the great Valhalla of connectivity, where you find far-flung kindred spirits and where you learn that your cousin knows your old neighbour’s dermatologist, when it comes to the experience of interaction, the web seems in some ways to obscure our deep social entanglement – and therefore to make us a little strange even to ourselves.

Dramaturgically speaking, on Twitter (or on your blog or Tumblr feed or whatever) you are standing on stage, brightly lit – and alone. You don’t know whether the seats in front of you are full or deserted (they're always kind of both). You start to talk. There is silence. Or someone yells, "Right on!" Or someone yells, "Bitch!" Or someone unfurls an ad that briefly obscures your face. With a glance or a click, you leave your stage and are transported to someone else's theatre; once there, you might shout something or remain silent, as the spirit moves you. This is not a conversation. It has some properties of a conversation – and it has its own delights – but it is something else.

Is this character of yours, alone and blinking against the glare, the same one who attends your friends' cocktail parties? Is it someone your colleagues would recognize? Is it the person your partner fell in love with? Is this soloist someone you had even met before blogging or Twitter or your first message board came along? If not, who cares? You?

Online self-fashioning has been a live topic for over a decade, as we have mused about avatars, fretted about adult predators posing as kids, and scolded exhibitionist teenagers. But the project of presenting your quotidian self online (someone whose name and career are the same as yours, whose breasts and/or biceps are the same size as yours) is not as often discussed as one might expect, considering how complicated the process and experience are. Roger Ebert has offered some remarkable writing on this topic; he has contemplated these issues more deeply than most of us because his online identity has in some ways replaced his in-person identity since the loss of his voice as a result of surgery.

Questions about various facets of one's identity and how they might play out through various media do not seem to keep Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg up at night. He has been quoted as saying, “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Many bloggers objected to this remark; I won't retread that ground – except to say that I hope Zuckerberg's grandmother likes dirty jokes from the dorm at Harvard, because a grandson of integrity will not hold them back.

Of course the social web is bringing formerly private aspects of many people's identities out into the light – whether those formerly private things are fat portfolios of villanelles or just pictures of your intern funneling beer. As this happens, our expectations about discretion and transparency will evolve. But the idea that tailoring your self-presentation to specific contexts suggests a lack of integrity contains some fairly remarkable assumptions about what it means to be honest with the people in one's life.

Representing yourself isn't just a matter of lying or not lying. "Audience," however fluid or abstract, intimate or particular, passive or vocal, shapes and reshapes our personalities. Other people help to constitute us; they are not just a bunch of cut-outs to whom we present our fully formed characters. This is why Twitter, which is so simple, is so fraught. If you go to a party, you can look people in the eye, see if they're bored, beat a retreat if something embarrassing happens. If you write an essay, you can assume that anyone reading it is interested in some combination of the topic and your approach to it. On Twitter, your audience is a borderless mess of friends and strangers, prospective clients and former intimates. The only thing that unites them is that they are (in a rather indifferent, non-urgent way) waiting to hear from you. Your job: show them “you.” Go ahead. Tweet. It's easy.