Alone With Goffman

Impression Management and the TV Series

Dados Bibliográficos

ID22093074
AutoresSimon Beames (0000-0003-1513-9745, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, autor correspondente), Søren Andkjær (0000-0002-9783-1032, University of Southern Denmark), Aage Radmann (0000-0002-0132-5873, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences)
Ano2021
Volume6
Data de publicação2021-07-09
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoFrontiers in Communication (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2297-900X • E-ISSN: 2297-900X
EditoraFrontiers Media SA (PUBLISHER • CH)
DOI10.3389/fcomm.2021.676555
OpenAlexW3181918752
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas15

Alone is an American reality television series on the History Channel. The show features 10 contestants who are vying to outlast each other while living off the land. Notably, there is no camera crew, and the contestants must film themselves everyday; the production team creates a weekly program that marks the journey of each individual. This study sought to understand the degree to which participants are able to shape their public identities through the video footage they shot and that was subsequently edited in Alone’s cutting room. The research team employed an explorative case study methodology, which allowed them to watch hours of publicly available official video clips from the History Channel’s Alone YouTube channel. The analysis was driven by theory (Goffman’s The Presentation of Self conceptual framework) and an inductive thematic analysis, which took place in a cyclical fashion through interpretation meetings at the end of each of the six series that were watched. The findings first showed that the contestants were performing to multiple audiences, such as their families, the public, the producers, and even God. Second, the boundary between the frontstage and the backstage was highly blurred. Third, the contestants were able to continue shaping and “repairing” their identities through their own social media outlets after the program. Finally, the theme of gendered approaches to living outdoors shone through in ways that were very complex, overlapping, and non-binary. There is an undeniably strong “impression management tension” between the selves that participants wanted to project and the narratives that were constructed by the Alone program’s producers

Impression · Impression management · Media studies · Social science · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Geology