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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from LWMap/Meta-honesty
from Protocols/Ideas
from virtue signalling
  • But the idea that you could analyze and write about this process as such – that's not so obvious, and I remember being kind of boggled when first read Erving Goffman, who wrote in great detail about the dramatic and narrative structures of everyday life, and in particular about how people managed their own presentation and reception.
from stance
  • Erving Goffman
    • Every person lives in a world of social encounters, involving him either in face-to-gace or mediated contact with other participants. 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. Regardless of whether a person intends to take a line, he will find that he has done so in effect.
      • From On Face-Work: An Analysis of the Ritual Elements in Social Interaction
from Weird Studies/Pretentiousness
from Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown
  • Interesting take on Erving Goffman. I never thought of Goffman as cynical before, but I guess his picture of people as sort of bleakly computing their status and maneuvering to control it is a pretty dark picture of social life.
    • The devastatingly original, not to mention often cynical, microsociology of Erving Goffman is based exactly on this theater. Goffman takes this to such lengths that at times his mode of exposition—his very grammar—implodes as each phrase redoubles the cynicism of the one before, thus creating pervasive mistrust of itself as well as of the world referenced. In other words, the mode of exposition bears a mimetic relationship to its content as well as displaying the outer limits of where such cynicism leads, throttling language in excesses of dissimulating fervor. (p46)
from Protocols/Formalism
  • One of the canonical examples used in the SIGFPT is handshaking. I haven't actually seen a formal model for this but you can imagine what it looks like: one party sees another, approaches, extends hands, grip, release, while the other party acts accordingly. You can make a state diagram for this, but it will probably fail to capture what is interesting about handshaking, all the subtle social cues involved in it. Here eg is a paper that tries to get at that with a Erving Goffman -microsociology lens: The handshake as interaction by Hall & Hall.
    • A 'good' handshake, according to Vanderbilt, is 'elbow level, firm, and brief' (1972:241). Post says, The proper handshake 'is made briefly, but there should be a feeling of strength and warmth in the clasp' (1940:23). Bad handshakes include the bone crusher — the grip that makes the other person, especially a woman wearing rings, wince. Or a limp, damp handshake that seems to say, 'I am not really happy to meet you at all!' Or it may be the kind of straightarm shake that seems to hold the other person off or the octopus grip that draws you inexorably toward the shaker, who never seems to want to let go.
from Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown
  • The devastatingly original, not to mention often cynical, microsociology of Erving Goffman is based exactly on this theater. Goffman takes this to such lengths that at times his mode of exposition—his very grammar—implodes as each phrase redoubles the cynicism of the one before, thus creating pervasive mistrust of itself as well as of the world referenced. In other words, the mode of exposition bears a mimetic relationship to its content as well as displaying the outer limits of where such cynicism leads, throttling language in excesses of dissimulating fervor. (p46)
from performativity
  • I am honestly not sure what this trendy academic concept means. That gender is performative, at least in part, seems blindingly obvious and I'm not sure why you want to make a thing of it. That everything is performative is something Erving Goffman and others theorized long ago, what is new.
Twin Pages

TwinPages: MeatBall

Erving Goffman

30 Oct 2021 - 12 Jan 2026
Open in Logseq
    • Microsociologist. "Strategic Interaction" is one of his books and the most cogent summary of his thinking – that social life is both an interactive performance and goal-oriented. I was into him back in grad school, when I was discovering sociology for the first time. Interest is being rekindled by the protocol movement.
    • I think I was attracted by the vast cynicism that permeates his work. Human interaction in. his model does not have much to do with love, companionship, or solidarity. Everybody is basically running a game on everybody else. One of his more famous pieces is about actual con men, "On Cooling the Mark Out", but that's just the explicit form of a dynamic that underlies all social life. There a quote in MNM that notices this:
      • The devastatingly original, not to mention often cynical, microsociology of Erving Goffman is based exactly on this theater. Goffman takes this to such lengths that at times his mode of exposition—his very grammar—implodes as each phrase redoubles the cynicism of the one before, thus creating pervasive mistrust of itself as well as of the world referenced. In other words, the mode of exposition bears a mimetic relationship to its content as well as displaying the outer limits of where such cynicism leads, throttling language in excesses of dissimulating fervor. (p46)

    • Earlier

      • Omniorthogonal: Personæ
        • The great sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a great deal about the techniques people use to stage their public life, in books like Interaction Ritual and The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. For example, he talks about the distinction between front and back regions, based on the areas within theater. On stage, a certain performance takes place, back stage the artifice is relaxed, but other types of performance take place. Goffman identifies similar structures in work life, for example, a medical office, where certain rules of conduct apply in areas where patients are, and others where doctors and staff congregate behind the scenes (or a the seating area and kitchen of a restaurant, to take an even clearer example).
        • Goffman talks about how different roles are played out in different contexts and how the tension between front and back areas is exploited by (for example) shills, who are members of the team putting on a performance who pretend to be members of the audience to channel energies of the actual audience members. In the land of the internet, shills are sometimes called sock puppets, which doesn't quite capture the institutionalization of such activity as found in casinos and elsewhere. Lee Siegel got mocked and fired for his sock-puppetry (although he hasn't lost his pundit licensesince he still publishes thumbsucker books and essays in the NY Times), but could he plausibly claim that he was just giving vent to the separate personas that we all have. Would the offense have been the same if the New Republic hired an intern to post enthusiastic comments on his blog (eg, if there was a real separate person performing the role)?
      • July 2015
        • I became an anthropologist because I was afraid of people. The choices were isolation, terror, or objectification through science. The latter seemed least objectionable, so I studied the great theorists of mind like Freud and Piaget, animal behavior from Tinbergen and Lorenz, social behavior from Marx and Goffman and many many others. Their latter-day computer-equipped prophets like Minsky. Synthesists like Ainslie.