Social Media Impression Management Essay

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Social media impression management essay

“All the world 's a stage, and all the men and women merely player… ” (2.7.146-47). Shakespeare’s poem pointed out everyone is only actors on the stage of this world. Goffman (1959) has a similar theory with Shakespeare that everyone is a performance; at any given moment, we play different roles. Through social media, everyone can carefully select what role that we want to project on virtual sphere.I argue that my identity changed varies different platform. In this essay, I discovered who am I online, what roles I was playing and how did I manage the impression I crave to give others on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Line.

“In each of these contacts, he tends to act out what is sometimes called a line – that is, a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and, through this, his evaluation of the participants, especially himself” (Goffman, 1967). Line is an impression I prefer to show to others. On Instagram, there is an identity that others cannot find on my Facebook. At the beginning, I opened an Instagram account to share my handmade works and drawings (Fig. 1.). I aspired to show a line that I was creative and talented. People liked me and left comments under my photos was giving me face (Goffman, 1967). They helped me to develop a positive face. And later I did not have the passion for engaging in DIY, and therefore, I began to post comparatively special things in my daily life, for example, my travel (Fig. 2.).
Front region is where the performance takes place; the back region is what I am literally doing behind the front stage (Goffman, 1959). On Fig.3, It can see that I shared a cheesecake and 8 egg tarts. It was obviously homemade and...

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...ge. Even now, I am engaged in a performance in which I am trying to not only apply Goffman theory on social media but information about me through sharing my front and back region, the writing style in which I did and so on. That is impression management. No one can draw a clear line between what is a front region and a back region of a platform (Goffman, 1959), it can transform freely. My roles, identities and face are changing through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Line (Goffman, 1967).

References
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual; essays on face-to-face behavior. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Shakespeare, W., Mowat, B., & Werstine, P. (2004). As you like it. New York: Washington Square Press.

Fig. 13 Sharing my feelings to friends on Line.

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