I’ve been thinking a lot lately about identity and social media, and social media as a performance space, and performative identity theories.
In her 2009 article “All the World Wide Web’s a stage”, Erika Pearson discusses social networking sites in terms of performance spaces, which include actors, a perceived audience, a front-stage (in which public performances are expected to occur) and a back stage (in which performances or interactions are expected to be private). The barriers between these areas, Pearson argues, begin to collapse when we begin talking about social media spaces in which actors can be divorced from their identifiable identity, and audiences may be invisible or unperceived or inattentive (2009). This argument has strongly reminded me of one of my favourite discussions of performative identity, which appropriately enough occurs in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1967).
Early in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come across a group of players, who inform them that :
PLAYER: We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else. (Act I)
This strikes me as being a particularly apt summary of identity and social media. So many of us live our lives connected online socially in multiple different ways. We engage online with personal communities and professional communities, with friends, families, co-workers, customers, partners, and strangers, and we do this in many different spaces, and through many different venues. More and more often, relationships and actions that formerly took place in private, or “off stage”, are now taking place in social media spaces, where the audience may be different than it previously would have been. And every exit from one space is only an entrance into another space.
Soon after meeting the Tragedians, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern request that The Player perform something for them. He agrees but continues to simply stand before them, at which point they begin to question him as to what exactly he is performing.
GUIL: Well…..aren’t you going to change into your costume?
PLAYER: I never change out of it, sir.
GUIL: Always in character.
PLAYER: That’s it.
Pause.
GUIL: Aren’t you going to—come on?
PLAYER: I am on.
GUIL: But if you are on, you can’t come on. Can you?
PLAYER: I start on.
(Act I)
Where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are baffled by The Player’s performance, it will seem awfully logical to a current audience. In the realm of social media spaces every movement is a part of the performance, every object always a prop, every article of clothing an element of costume. We start on, and we are always in character. While Pearson argues that social media spaces are playful and freeing, I have to question whether such a constant performance is any such thing. As The Player later states:
PLAYER: Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in. (Act II)
While we may be free to anonymously create and explore new identities within social media spaces, are we not nonetheless bound by the mores, rules, and expectations of those spaces? Our identities define us as much as we define them, as The Player demonstrates:
PLAYER: We’re more of the blood, love, and rhetoric school…I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they’re all blood you see. (Act I)
Even when portraying various identities, we are still constrained to act a certain way by the venues and identities we are performing in. And when that venue is the realm of social media, the performance is continuous.
Pearson, Erika. “All the World Wide Web’s a stage: The performance of identity in online social networks.” First Monday [Online], 14.3 (2009): n. pag. Web. 3 Feb. 2016
Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. New York, New York: Grove Press, 1967. Print.