The Performed Self: Goffman Goes Online

Long before Facebook or TikTok, sociologist Erving Goffman argued that everyday life was a stage. We perform different roles depending on context—parent, employee, friend—each with its own script and costume. But digital platforms collapse these social boundaries. Online, we speak to our boss, our mother, and our high school acquaintance all at once. The result is a single audience made of conflicting expectations.

This encourages a kind of strategic self-fashioning. We present not our whole selves, but the versions most likely to garner approval. Posts are edited, angles chosen, captions curated. Even spontaneity becomes a kind of branding. The digital self is not necessarily false, but it is constructed—sculpted under the gaze of an algorithmic audience.

Fragmentation and Multiplicity

Rather than a single “authentic” self, we now live as many. LinkedIn demands professionalism; Instagram rewards aesthetics; Twitter encourages wit or outrage. We adapt accordingly, shifting tone, content, even values depending on the platform. This fragmentation can be liberating—allowing us to explore facets of ourselves once constrained by geography or social norms.

But it also raises questions. Is identity becoming too fluid? Are we losing a stable sense of self in favour of digital versatility? The philosopher Charles Taylor once wrote of the “authentic self” as something discovered, not performed. In contrast, today’s online life suggests that identity is more like a wardrobe—selected, displayed, and often changed to fit the moment.

Some find coherence in this multiplicity. Others experience dissonance—a sense that they are living in fragments, unable to integrate the parts. The pressure to maintain multiple digital selves can lead to fatigue, anxiety, and a disconnection from one's offline life.

The Paradox of Authenticity

Against this backdrop, a new digital value has emerged: authenticity. Influencers gain followings by being “real”—sharing unfiltered moments, raw emotions, and everyday struggles. But even this sincerity is stylised. Vulnerability becomes content. The line between confession and performance dissolves.

This creates a paradox. To be authentic online, one must appear authentic. But appearing authentic is itself a strategy—a pose that can be learned, mimicked, even monetised. The result is a curious cycle in which people perform their own unfiltered selves, often more convincingly than their curated personas.

Yet something real does remain. The digital self, for all its mediation, still reflects desires, values, fears. The effort to be seen, understood, and appreciated is not new—it is simply taking place in a new arena, under new rules.

The Digital Self as Mirror and Mask

So what is the online self? A mask? A mirror? Perhaps both. It reveals and conceals in equal measure—projecting a version of us into the world while shaping how we see ourselves in return. It is neither wholly inauthentic nor entirely real.

In the end, the digital self is best understood not as a distortion, but as a refraction. Like light passing through glass, our identity is bent by the medium through which it travels. This is not inherently false; it is the nature of mediation. Just as a diary reveals one side of a person, and a conversation another, so too does the feed, the profile, the tweet.

What matters is not returning to some pre-digital purity, but developing a deeper self-awareness. To ask not only how we present ourselves, but why. To understand that being online is not a departure from the self—but a negotiation with it, shaped by the tools we use, and the audiences we imagine.