Speaker:

Jeremy Birnholtz, Professor, School of Communication, Northwestern University

Title:

Self-Presentation in Sociotechnical Life: How We Present Ourselves to Each Other in a World of Digital Platforms

Abstract:

Self-presentation, rooted in Goffman’s classic work, is the fundamental social process by which people shape their public personas and play the social roles (e.g., teacher, student, lesbian, doctor, etc.) that structure our everyday interactions. Today’s social platforms and communication technologies, however, complicate this process in ways that Goffman could never have anticipated. Specifically, the “physics” of how information moves in the environment have changed and can vary widely from platform to platform. And we lack a systematic framework for discussing these differences and how people cope with them (and their consequences). In this talk, I will discuss a book manuscript Michael Ann DeVito and I are working on to address this gap. I will give an overview of the framework, our focus in particular on LGBTQ+ populations, and how we can use this work to better understand and describe important social behavior in a range of online contexts.

Speaker Bio:

Jeremy Birnholtz is a Professor in the Communication Studies and, by courtesy, Computer Science Departments at Northwestern University. He is a recent past Van Zelst Research Professor and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern, and has also worked as a visiting professor at Facebook. Jeremy has been studying the social dynamics of online attention and self-presentation for nearly 20 years in work supported by the National Science Foundation, Facebook and Google. His work has been published in top journals and conferences in HCI, organization behavior and communication.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95815707325
Passcode: NICO2024

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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