The flourishing of internet applications such as Facebook, Twitter and
YouTube and the pervasion of media and celebrity culture has brought a
corresponding escalation of the theatrical conditions of everyday
life. Self-branding has become mandatory, not just for corporations
but for individuals seeking visibility in the public arena.
These developments have drastically increased the contrast between
private and public. In 1959 the sociologist Erving Goffman published
his influential theory for human behavior governed by a theatrical
metaphor in which everyday social life was enacted as if on stage in
front of an audience, while another self is backstage. This view of
the split between public and private protects the vulnerable self yet
dooms it to secrecy, hiding behind a performing mask.
There has been continuing debate over the paradoxical exposure of the
private sphere, over what Roland Barthes described as ‘the creation of
a new social value, which is the publicity of the private’. Concern
about the effects of the changing social balance became a recurrent
theme for twentieth-century writers such as Hannah Arendt, Jürgen
Habermas and Richard Sennett, who believed that the shared public
realm was undermined by the increased clamour for attention by private
lives.
Exposure is often thought to be a desirable function of
self-portraits. But self-portraits also work by concealment, a
technique pursued ingeniously by Rembrandt through lighting effects
that obscured his face or elaborate costume changes that multiplied
his identity. In the twentieth century artists have gone further,
replacing the notion of hidden private depths with that of a
camouflage or a disappearing self. Most notably Andy Warhol overrode
the idea of privacy in favour of an aesthetic of fame. After the
hyperactive glamour of his images, depth became less tenable; identity
is defined in terms of shifting surface appearances, a development
corresponding with the abandonment of a singular model for human
identity, characteristic of later twentieth-century art and
philosophy.
Yet this emphasis on surface and the underlying disconnect between
self and society, public and private, enabled an expansion of selves
within societal norms. The performance of self gave cathartic
expression to otherwise repressed emotions and created new models for
human identity that have fed back into the diversity of human culture. Vivien Gaston
YouTube and the pervasion of media and celebrity culture has brought a
corresponding escalation of the theatrical conditions of everyday
life. Self-branding has become mandatory, not just for corporations
but for individuals seeking visibility in the public arena.
These developments have drastically increased the contrast between
private and public. In 1959 the sociologist Erving Goffman published
his influential theory for human behavior governed by a theatrical
metaphor in which everyday social life was enacted as if on stage in
front of an audience, while another self is backstage. This view of
the split between public and private protects the vulnerable self yet
dooms it to secrecy, hiding behind a performing mask.
There has been continuing debate over the paradoxical exposure of the
private sphere, over what Roland Barthes described as ‘the creation of
a new social value, which is the publicity of the private’. Concern
about the effects of the changing social balance became a recurrent
theme for twentieth-century writers such as Hannah Arendt, Jürgen
Habermas and Richard Sennett, who believed that the shared public
realm was undermined by the increased clamour for attention by private
lives.
Exposure is often thought to be a desirable function of
self-portraits. But self-portraits also work by concealment, a
technique pursued ingeniously by Rembrandt through lighting effects
that obscured his face or elaborate costume changes that multiplied
his identity. In the twentieth century artists have gone further,
replacing the notion of hidden private depths with that of a
camouflage or a disappearing self. Most notably Andy Warhol overrode
the idea of privacy in favour of an aesthetic of fame. After the
hyperactive glamour of his images, depth became less tenable; identity
is defined in terms of shifting surface appearances, a development
corresponding with the abandonment of a singular model for human
identity, characteristic of later twentieth-century art and
philosophy.
Yet this emphasis on surface and the underlying disconnect between
self and society, public and private, enabled an expansion of selves
within societal norms. The performance of self gave cathartic
expression to otherwise repressed emotions and created new models for
human identity that have fed back into the diversity of human culture. Vivien Gaston
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