With a simple glance at your friends’ or followers’ posts on social networks like Facebook or Instagram, we can see how people reflect their lives and personalities through the photos and videos they upload.

However, in these networks there is no sign of suffering, hardship or sadness in the profiles of any of their members. We see a multitude of photos of happy faces, landscapes, smiles, phrases of overcoming; and yet there is no room for such an overwhelming and certain reality as the existence of human pain and suffering in each person’s life.

What do we really know about others when we see their profile on social networks? Can these virtual platforms tell us what people are really like?

This market of the signs of happiness that we find every time you open the social networks, can be seen from one of the great theories of personality, the one developed by the sociologist and writer, Erving Goffman.

Erving Goffman and the personality created by interactions

This author develops his work around the creation of personality through interactions with others. He argues that much of our behavior depends on interpersonal scenarios and usually takes the form of what we want to achieve and what we are interested in from our interlocutors. This is a constant handling of our image before others.

According to Goffman, interaction is always about defining the situation in a way that allows us to gain control over the impressions others have of us. From this perspective, the best definition that corresponds to a person is that of an actor who plays a role and who acts through interactions with others.

From this theory, interaction would consist of creating impressions that allow us to form the inferences that benefit us and that reflect the intentions and aspects of our own identity that we want to communicate, making the relationship with others a continuous handling of public image, a successive series of self-presentations.

Goffman’s theory and social networks

Nowadays, these self-presentations could be each one of the photos and videos that we make available to all those who follow us on social networks, as a way of managing to create a positive image about others in order to obtain benefits about the followers themselves. But not only that would serve to sell our public image, but also each of the interactions that we carry out on a daily basis.

The meeting with the baker when you buy your bread, the daily coffee with your colleagues, the appointment with that person who introduced you to a friend… Any of these scenarios involves the creation of impressions and, depending on your interpretation, the people you interact with will impose one personality or another on you.

From this perspective, identity is the form of presentation of the subject according to the advantages and disadvantages of the possible multiple identities of the subject at a given moment. In short, the theory of social action of Goffman would explain a set of roles that we are interpreting in each interaction with the objective of obtaining benefits and, mainly, to be accepted by society.

Goffman insists that such a game of representations never transmits the real identity, but the wanted identity, for this reason, human behavior is characterized by the techniques of advertising, marketing and interpretation, so Goffman’s model reflects the importance that negotiation has as a form of social interaction .

The public image market

It is easy to conclude that this is a somewhat Machiavellian theory of identity based on the superficial, the aesthetic and the false. However, the similarities of this author’s conclusions with the world of social networks and personal treatment, where there is no room for suffering and misfortune but where everything is hidden behind the products of a supermarket of happiness, appearances and aesthetics, are very real and need to be taken into account.

At least, to make us aware that the person behind that Instagram account may be far from the person he or she really is .