The document discusses Erving Goffman's theory of how individuals manage impressions through performances of self in everyday social interactions. Goffman argues that people engage in both expressions they give and expressions they give off, and must maintain control over how audiences perceive them. Individuals aim to define situations favorably and conceal any aspects that could discredit the impressions they want to foster.

1. The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life
by Erving Goffman

2. The participant’s dramaturgical problems
of presenting one’s self
“a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false
revelation, and rediscovery”

3. Expressions we give vs. give off
 "The expressiveness of the individual appears to involve two radically different kinds
of sign activity: the expression that he gives, and the expression that he gives off"

4. An information game
“When an individual appears before others he will have many
motives for trying to control the impression they receive of
the situation”

5. Belief in the part one is playing
“the individual may attempt to induce the audience to judge
him and the situation in a particular way”

6. Sincere or cynical?

7. Front
The Joe Schmo Show
 “A given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the
abstract stereotyped expectations”

8. Front
 “He [an observer] can place the situation in a broad category
around which it is easy for him to mobilize his past experience and
stereotypical thinking”

9. A desire to perform the given task or a
desire to maintain the corresponding front
New York Nene Leakes

10. Dramatic Realization
 “In mobilizing his behavior to make a showing, he will be
concerned not so much with the full round of the different routine
he performs but only with the one from which his occupational
reputation derives.”

11. Idealization
“incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of
the society”

12. “upward mobility involves the presentation of proper
performances and that efforts to move upward and efforts to
keep from moving downward are expressed in are expressed
in terms of sacrifices made for the maintenance of front”

13. Concealment
“profitable form of activity that is concealed from his
audience”

14. Concealment
Real Housewives
“we tend to conceal from our audience all evidence of ‘dirty
work’

15. “Foster the impression that the routine they are presently
performing is their only routine or at least their most
essential one”
Catch Me If You Can

16. Maintenance of Expressive Control
“the audience may misunderstand the meaning that a cue was
designed to convey, or may read an embarrassing meaning
into gestures or events that were accidental, inadvertent, or
incidental and not meant by the performer to carry any
meaning whatsoever”

17. Misrepresentation
“When we think of those who present a false front or ‘only’ a
front, of those who dissemble, deceive, and defraud, we
think of a discrepancy between fostered appearances and
reality”

18. What are the ways in which a given
impression can be discredited?

19. Mystification
“We have, then, a basic social coin, with awe on one side and
shame on the other. The audience senses secret mysteries
and powers behind the performance.”

20. Reality & Contrivance
“Anyone can quickly learn a script well enough to give a
charitable audience some sense of realness”

21. The legitimate performances of
everyday life…
…are not “acted” or “put on” in the sense that the performer
knows in advance just what he is going to do”