The “I” is the immediate response of an individual to others. It is that part of the self that is unconscious, incalculable, unpredictable, and creative. Neither the person nor the members of the group know in advance what that response of the “I” is going to be. As a result of the “I,” people often surprise themselves, and certainly others, with the unexpected things they say and do. Mead greatly values the “I” for various reasons, including the fact that it is the source of new and original responses.
The “me” is the organized set of others’ attitudes and behaviors adopted by the individual. In other words, the “me” involves the acceptance and internalization by the individual of the generalized other. To Mead, the “me” involves a conscious understanding of what a person’s responsibilities are to the larger group. The behaviors associated with the “me” also tend to be habitual and conventional. We all have a “me,” but conformists have an overly powerful “me.” It is through the “me” that society is able to dominate the individual. In fact, Mead defines “social control” as the dominance of the “I” by the “me.”
Nevertheless, people and society as a whole need both “I” and “me.” For the individual, the “me” allows for a comfortable existence within various social groupings. The “I” lends some spice to what might otherwise be a boring existence. For society, the “me” provides the conformity needed for stable and orderly interaction. The “I” is the source of changes in society as it develops and adapts to the shifting environment.
The Individual as Performer
Erving Goffman (1922–1982) is another important contributor to the symbolic interactionists’ understanding of the self and how it develops (Jacobsen and Kristiansen 2015). Goffman’s work on the self was deeply influenced by Mead’s thinking, especially the tension between the “I” and the “me.” In Goffman’s work, this distinction takes the form of the tension between what we want to do spontaneously and what people expect us to do (Goffman 1959).
Goffman developed the notion of dramaturgy, which views an individual’s social life as a series of dramatic performances akin to those that take place on a theatrical stage. To Goffman, the self is not a thing possessed by the individual but the dramatic product of the interaction between people and their audiences (Manning 2007). While many performances of the self are successful, there is always the possibility that performances can be disrupted by the actions of audiences. For example, audiences can jeer at performances or even walk out on them. Goffman focuses on these possibilities and what people can do to prevent them by improving their dramatic performances or to deal with disruptions once they occur.
At matchmaking events, like this one in China, people obviously carefully manage the impressions they make on others. However, impression management is a reality in almost all of everyday life.
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Impression Management
When people interact with others, they use a variety of techniques to control the images of themselves they want to project during their social performances. They seek to maintain these impressions even when they encounter problems in their performances (Manning 2005). Goffman (1959) called these efforts to maintain certain images impression management.
For example, in your sociology class you might typically project an image of a serious, well-prepared student. One night you might stay up late partying instead of completing your required reading. When the instructor asks a question in class, you might try to maintain your image by pretending to take notes rather than raising your hand. Called on nonetheless, you struggle, in vain, to give a well-thought-out, serious answer to the question. The smiles and snickers of fellow students who know that you were out partying late the night before might disrupt the performance you are endeavoring to put on. To deflect attention from you to them, you might suggest that they try to answer the question.
Impression management relates directly to the plots of many movies. In the world of the 2014 movie Divergent (see also the 2015–2017 sequels, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Ascendant), most people live in one of five “factions,” while a few are relegated to a sixth group, “the Factionless,” which exists at the bottom of the social stratification system. Assignment to a faction is based, at least in part, on a test score, but some test results are inconclusive because the test takers defy categorization; they are “divergent.” To conceal their difference, which is generally considered unacceptable in their society, they engage in impression management. While all of us sometimes fail at impression management, the cost of failure to those who diverge—death—is much greater than is the cost to us in our social world.
However, in some cases—for example, Jews trying to pass as non-Jews in Nazi Germany—failure at impression management can have similarly dire consequences. While the idea of impression management is generally associated with face-to-face social interaction, it also applies to interaction on social networking sites. For instance, many people constantly change the pictures on their Facebook pages to alter the images of themselves being conveyed to others (Cunningham 2013). Others use social media platforms like Twitter to create personal brands, marketing their presentations of self to become popular or newsworthy (Brems et al. 2017).
Ask Yourself
What impression management activities do you undertake? Have they generally been successful? Do you see yourself performing more of these activities as time goes on or fewer? Why?
Trending Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2017)
Sherry Turkle
One controversial issue today is whether technology is contributing to a decline in meaningful social relationships. Some experts argue that technology can help us build and maintain social networks, but in Alone Together, Sherry Turkle offers a critical look at how an array of recent technologies are leaving us detached and afraid of face-to-face social interactions. Turkle finds that some people prefer interacting with social robots instead of real humans because they do not have to deal with unpredictable emotions that might make them feel vulnerable—robots love unconditionally, and they never die. These social robots are so technologically sophisticated that they can follow our gaze and even talk to us, making it seem like they can empathize and understand our feelings. Turkle warns that intimacy with machines is no substitute for human intimacy and that machine–human relationships cause us to reduce our expectations of other humans.
When we do engage in social interactions with other humans, many of us often do so using technology, such as smartphones or computers. These machine-mediated exchanges allow us to communicate quickly and conveniently but not very expressively. While communicating via text, social media, and e-mail can be practical, it is also more impersonal and less spontaneous than face-to-face interactions are. For example, announcing a pregnancy on Facebook might be efficient, but it might also be insensitive if a person has not personally told close family members and friends first. New technologies allow us to edit and manage our impressions