What makes a main character? Is it their personality, their appearance, their circumstances? Or perhaps it’s simply a foregone conclusion based on the way the media frames them? After all, no one needs to tell you that Meredith Grey or Harry Potter is a main character, you just know it. The thing is, creating characters used to be the business of filmmakers, authors, musicians, etc. Now, with social media, we’ve taken that ability into our own hands – using ourselves as the muse.
A contemporary extension of what Goffman theorized about identity roughly half a century before the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, we’re now using all available technology to conduct a show online and put ourselves center stage. Most of our social media accounts, whether consciously or not, are more a production, a work of fiction, than a viable representation of who we are. We’re all constantly trying to improve upon this outward image of our identities while probably very often neglecting the inner self.
In recent years, an on-again-off-again trend of having “main character energy” has been swirling around social media. Often well-intentioned, it draws on our innate wish to be the main character, to be desirable and powerful and in control, and gives us examples of people who really seem to have achieved that. What it really does, in all the other cases, is perpetuate a phenomenon that keeps everyone viewing their own profile, their own online presence through a hypercritical and completely imagined lens where everyone else is constantly evaluating them.
As Paddy Scannell discussed in Communication as Interaction, “it is one of Goffman’s key insights that the self – whatever it might be – is not some innate and given thing (it is not an identity), but rather something that is enacted and performed.” Social media allows us to do this in a disconnected and societally acceptable way, as we collectively fabricate and facilitate “main character energy” and other trendy, internet versions of our selves.
We’re all, whether we know it or not, living in our perception of the real world and among all of these other people we constantly compare our digital selves to. Just as only you know who you truly are, separate of the photos and posts and captions, your friends, role models, favorite celebrities, etc. are the only ones who know what their lives are really like. Even influencers and accounts that monetize the concept of “pulling back the curtain” are still contrived on some level. Modern technology provides us the building blocks to quite literally construct our character, our stages, and therefore manipulate public perception on a scale that even Goffman himself never imagined.
Scannell, P. (2007). Media and Communication. London: Sage. ‘Chapter 6: Communication as Interaction: Goffman and Garfinkel, USA, 1950s-1970s’ (pp. 145-168)
Image Credit: Trill
