Which performance is which?

Originally dramaturgical sociology was derived from the greatest playwright in the English language: William Shakespeare but the term was first adapted into sociology by Goffman. Simply ‘dramaturgy’ can be defined as “A sociological perspective stemming from symbolic interactionism” but for Goffman sociological dramaturgy is the “creation, maintenance, and destruction of common understandings of reality by people working”. When looking at Dramaturgy this week subject matter examined actual self, performance of self, front stage, backstage and the audience. 

After reading this week’s reading and looking over the lecture slides and recording I was very confused and I struggled to understand and get my head around the whole idea. Through the in detail tutorial discussions and examples the concept soon began to sink in and I was able to adapt my own everyday examples to the idea. What this idea did for me was open up the assessment of my own everyday activities and how I ‘perform’ differently dependant on my surroundings, groups of friends and location eg: my workplace.

What I have found interesting is that we undoubtedly create a number of ‘personas’ or faces for ourselves with the idea of impressing the specific audience and these are dependent on our situations and ‘audience’- friends or family. I feel that for most of us we are aware that our performance at work would vary from our performance with our friends and again with our family and for me until now I have ‘performed’ in this manner without realisation. I have since analysed the idea of dramaturgy with friends and family and looked at the different ‘performances’ they have amongst their audiences. 

Do you feel that you vary your ‘performances’ depending on your audiences? Which performance do you deem as your true performance? Why do you feel that you do this?