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Cited by 465

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 43 of the 43 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

‘The presentation of self in the online world’: Goffman and the study of online identities

Open access
Bullingham, Liam, Vasconcelos, Ana C.·2013·Journal of Information Science

Abstract

This paper presents an exemplification and discussion of the contemporaneity of Erving Goffman’s work and of its applicability to the analysis of identity and presentation of self in the blogging and Second Life (SL) contexts. An analysis of online identity and interaction practices in 10 different cases of bloggers and SL inhabitants and of their online spaces is presented in terms of: expressions given; embellishment as a minor form of persona adoption; dividing the self; conforming and ‘fitting in’; and masking, anonymity and pseudonimity. The key finding of the research is that, contrary to engaging with the process of whole persona adoption, participants were keen to re-create their offline self online, but engaged in editing facets of self. This emphasizes the key premise in Goffman’s work that, when in ‘front stage’, people deliberately chose to project a given identity. It is concluded that Goffman’s original framework is of great usefulness as an explanatory framework for understanding identity through interaction and the presentation of self in the online world. Equally, the online environment, with its enhanced potential for editing the self, can offer opportunities to contribute to the further development of the Goffman framework.

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Metadata

Authors
Bullingham, L., & Vasconcelos, A. C.
Venue
Journal of Information Science
Published
2013-01-04
Volume
39
Issue
1
Pages
101-112
ISSN
  • 0165-5515 (ISSN-L)
  • 1741-6485
OpenAlex
W2128979675
Cited by
465
References
43
FWCI
23.35
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: ‘The presentation of self in the online world’: Goffman and the study of online identities. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0165551512470051
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Bullingham, L., & Vasconcelos, A. C. (2013). ‘The presentation of self in the online world’: Goffman and the study of online identities. Journal of Information Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551512470051

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.