Ervin Goffman "Choose your self-presentations carefully for what starts out as a mask may become your face". It is true that we are actors in real life because we assume roles and behaviours which are likely to help us maintain relations and be liked by others. We are human and as a result we have an innate need to be liked. Goffman's five terms about self presentation are persona, roles, staging, performing and teams.
Persona
The importance of presentation of the self is the believe that each of us in our everyday life is playing a series of parts. We learn and assume roles in real life like actors in television acting. We play parts as performers and audience but write our own scripts of life and how we want our lives to be like. People set out certain impressions which determine their personalities and how they want to be seen.
Performance
We can perform certain performances in order to give people a certain impression about ourselves and try to convince or alter their initial thinking about us. We are real life performers and the people around us are the audience who get to watch us perform and judge us from our performances and create a certain impression about us.
Staging
We can agree that setting is a very important aspect in everyday situations. Just like how actors behave differently when they are on stage and off-stage, we also behave differently when there are people around[on-stage] and when we are alone[off-stage]. It all depends on the setting in which we find ourselves in, i think we can all agree that the way we act when we are with our families or we are alone in our own rooms and houses is different to the way we act when we are at work with our colleagues or strangers. It is unconscious and human nature.
Teams
Speaking of family is also where the issue of teams fits in, we can all agree that in order for a family to keep up the impression which they give off such as of unity they have to work together with all the other family members in order to keep up that impression and similarly in order for church members to be able to keep a certain impression about their church and the believes they stand for, they have to work together to give such impression. The teams[ family members,church members etc] all perform and stage a particular impression which will alter peoples opinion about them.
Roles
We engage in roles which are considered patterns of behaviour suitable for particular group of audience. For example the social roles we play with our friends are not the same roles we play with our parents. The actions differ depending on the type or roles which we are engaging in.
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