The interplay of setting and audience in enacting self-presentations

The interplay of the setting and audience is a critical aspect in enacting self-presentations. Individuals seek to create different impressions on different sets of audience based on their specific goal for the interaction. For instance, at a work meeting, the setting is the conference room and the audience are colleagues and clients. In such self-presentations, individuals may dramatise their presentations to draw emphasis to specific impressions they wish to foster. For instance, at a work meeting, individuals may interrupt a colleague in order to convey their point across in a stern manner, presumably intending to foster an impression of an assertive person. Goffman (1959) refers to such self-presentations as region behaviour; the discrepancy between one’s behaviour when with different kinds of audience. “When one’s activity occurs in the

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presence of other persons, some aspects of the activity are expressively accentuated and other aspects, which might discredit the fostered impression, are suppressed..there may be another region – a ‘background’ or ‘backstage’ – where the suppressed facts make an appearance” (Goffman, 1959, p.114). In this section, I explore the interplay of setting and audience, where in most cases the setting takes a subcutaneous form.

A literature review suggests there are two types of audience, one introspective wherein individuals are working on internal impression management goals like self-esteem and the other external, that is to the public, which scholars view as more strategic. One perspective of the audience when enacting self-presentations is that the audience is internal, implying self as the audience. Schlenker (1982) suggests self-presentations are an attempt to control images projected in real or imagined social situations. This view of self-presentations suggests individuals maintain a delicate balance between self-enhancement, accuracy and humility in social interactions. Individuals attempt to control an image about the self by either highlighting favourable facts about the self that might otherwise be unknown or convey an image of being modest by underplaying one’s achievements; thus implying that a self-presentation is ‘self- relevant’, or relevant only to the self. Greenwald & Breckler (1985) add to this perspective and refer to the self as the ‘inner-audience’ in making a self-presentation. By forcing the individual to introspect, individuals construct their self-concept in the process of impression management (Gecas, 1982). Gardner & Martinko (1988b) suggest that personality traits such as self- monitoring ability, machiavellism, need for approval and social anxiety facilitate individuals’ responses to impression management cues and audience reactions, that is, individuals who monitor the self closely, seek approval and experience social anxiety are inclined to experience

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stress in the self-presentation process as these personality traits are cognitively demanding; or as Gardner & Martinko (1988a, p.327) explain, “actor cognitions like self-concept, attributions, cognitive scripts, role-expectations, and self-efficacy expectations guide actors in evaluating self- presentation strategies”. In their study, they identify four cognitive demands that shape the novelty of their performances; audience formality, favourability, and familiarity. In regards to setting, where the audience is internal, the setting is irrelevant as individuals focus on core aspects of the self; nonetheless, these cognitive processes are relevant at the workplace where individuals desire career progression and invest themselves cognitively in defining their task, role and situation to gain upward mobility by fostering a positive self-image.

Typically, within the literature on self-presentations, a popular stance is to define the audience as the ‘the assembled spectators, or listeners at a public event’, that is, when individuals try to control impressions, they try to control impressions of the self in front of a public gathering. In the physical presence of an audience, individuals can be flexible in their enactments and quickly modify performances based on audience feedback. For instance, street artists gauge success of their performances based on indicators of success like claps, bigger crowds or money collection. In the writings of Baumeister (1982), Baumeister & Tice (1984) and Goffman (1959) the reference to the audience is external. This audience could be a set of strangers (for example, at the theatre), a familiar set of people (for example, the workplace) or a mix of both (for example, at a party).

In reviewing the literature on the interplay of setting and the audience in the self-presentation process, recently, the focus has shifted to studying self-presentations on social media. In these

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studies, scholars extend Goffman’s (1959) theory to interactions on social media (Rui & Stefanone, 2013; Guadagno et al., 2012; Papacharissi, 2002), suggesting that all interactions on social media may be considered as performative. As the studies are recent, we know little about the interplay of the setting and the audience, however, scholars explain that social media adds dynamicity to performative interactions in this aspect. The audience on social media is ephemeral and spatial (Ellison et al., 2007); that is, the audience on social media transitions from one site to another in quick succession and cannot be counted. In spatial terms, not only are individuals connected to each other across great geographical distances, members of the audience overlap across physical and virtual settings. In addition, audience on social media can be anonymous or with false identities, thus making it difficult to gauge audience. Thus, the closest understanding we can make of who constitutes audience on social media is in referring to audience as ‘imagined’. Anderson (1991, p.6) defines an ‘imagined community’ as “a set of people within a community, where the members will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives an image of their communion”. Consequently, the audience on social media is assorted, diverse and overlaps across the physical and virtual settings. When interacting with such a dynamic audience across physical and virtual settings, individuals struggle in few aspects with regard to performative interactions. As Schultze & Mason (2012, p.301) inform us, “in these evolving spaces, the boundaries between actual and virtual reality, between living individuals and their virtual bodies, and between private and public domains are becoming even more blurred”. In other words, by virtue of interacting on social media, individuals transition between virtual and actual realities, often reporting incidents occurring in one medium to the audience in the other (Jenkins, 2006). The overlap of interactions, audience and the setting on social media creates conflicts for individuals in enacting self-

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presentations on social media. For instance, one conflict is that individuals may not be fully aware of their audience during performative interactions. Another conflict is an overlap of interactions might inevitably lead to an overlap of self-presentations across the physical-virtual setting and personal-professional life. Thirdly, in contrast to self-presentations in the physical setting wherein enactments are situated within a context and thus time-bound, on social media, self-presentations transcend space, place and time. Thus, in regard to self-presentations on social media, two questions may be asked at this point: are individuals aware of their audience during performative interactions? And can all interactions on such evolving spaces as social media sites be considered performative?