Goffman’s Backstage Revisited: Conceptual Relevance in Contemporary Social Interactions

Abstract

Goffman’s analytical proposal for the interpretation of situations of interaction was, according to the author himself, expressly formulated for face-to-face situations with the actors physically present. This conceptual paper aims to analyse some highlights specifically about backstage – its conceptual meaning and its potential heuristic relevance for the interpretation of social interactions in the contemporary world. For this purpose, a documentary selection geared by the concept of backstage was carried out, which allows considering that the sociological understanding of the interactions that take place in an online context could be deepened with an enhancement of Goffman’s theory considering that there is a tendency to a greater plasticity in the presentation of the self in this type of interactions with a greater identity flow.