Jeremy Birnholtz shares talk on self-presentation in the digital world
By Maggie McDonald
On Friday, November 3, Northwestern University’s Jeremy Birnholtz joined the department of Library and Information Science to share a talk entitled Self-Presentation in Socio-Technical Life: How We Present Ourselves to Each Other in a World of Digital Platforms as part of the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics (RKCSI) Speaker Series.
Birnholtz discussed self-presentation, rooted in Goffman’s classic work, which is the fundamental social process by which people shape their public personas and play the social roles (e.g., teacher, student, lesbian, doctor, etc.) that structure our everyday interactions. Today’s social platforms and communication technologies, according to Birnholtz, complicate this process in ways that Goffman could never have anticipated. Specifically, the “physics” of how information moves in the environment have changed and can vary widely from platform to platform. We currently lack a systematic framework for discussing these differences and how people cope with them (and their consequences), which led Birnholtz and collaborator Michael Ann DeVito to start working on a book manuscript to address this gap. Birnholtz shared some details from the manuscript, as well as an overview of the framework—which places focus in particular on LGBTQ+ populations–and how we can use this work to better understand and describe important social behavior in a range of online contexts.
Birnholtz is a Professor in the Communication Studies and, by courtesy, Computer Science Departments at Northwestern University. He is a recent past Van Zelst Research Professor and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern and has also worked as a visiting professor at Facebook. Jeremy has been studying the social dynamics of online attention and self-presentation for nearly 20 years in work supported by the National Science Foundation, Facebook and Google. His work has been published in top journals and conferences in HCI, organization behavior and communication.