Grouping Social Media Users Through Goffman’s Dramaturgical Approach and the Preservation of Self Presentation

Abstract

The transformation of social media has identified the modern self in the age of New media. With the accumulation of users' numbers and merged functions of social media platforms, it is worthy to be reexamined that whether traditional semiotics and sociological explanations are still valid for the new self-presentation behavior. To understand how users in the new media age gain their self-identities through social media platforms, the account posted content analysis and user interactions are put into scrutiny by this study. The Chinese social media application Wechat is available for study purposes due to its large user number and its users' alternative options to choose other social applications such as Instagram. By applying Goffman's dramaturgical theory onto the sociological observation on users' behaviors of Chinese successful social platform and communicational applications Wechat, this study argues that the self-presentation of the new media users is still coherent to the stage-persona analysis from Goffman. It is observed that the selectiveness and the consciousness of users' performing self have been changed by the environment of social media innovations. The unique case of the quasi-Instagram social content Finsta is also introduced in this study.