In the *Presentation of Self in Everyday Life*, Erving Goffman describes the act of "being in public" as "front stage behavior", comparing one to an actor on a stage. An actor is aware of being observed, and generally projects a certain image that complies with the expectations of the "audience". When "back stage", one is able to remove their mask, end their performance, and ease into their "true self", (Bullingham & Vasconcelos, 2012). Bullingham and Vasconcelos (2012) write that "it has been proposed above that online environments provide their users the potential to perform and present different identities. The distance between performer and audience that physical detachment provides makes it easy to conceal aspects of the offline self and embellish the online," (p. 2). However, the conclusions of their study on identity creation online indicated that participants were actually likely to recreate their offline self. This leads me to think about the metaphor of the internet as a digital city which I describe in a note on [[Cognitive Sustainability#^9c4347|cognitive sustainability]]. While on the internet, are we *always* front stage, all the time - even when our personal pages on various social media sites are "private"? I think this further defines the urbanity of the internet: > Being in public—that is, in the presence of strangers in spaces, we do not control—is the quintessential urban experience. The attributes of public space, with its particular rules and combinations of formality and informality (as explored by Erving Goffman 1963), its emphasis on artifice and appearances, the possibility of serendipitous encounters, and its promise of social membership and sociability (as discussed by Richard Sennett 1978; 2018 and Ari Adut 2018) are among of defining characteristics of urbanity, (Kasinitz, 2020). In my previously mentioned note on [[Cognitive Sustainability#^9c4347|cognitive sustainability]], I compare the digital garden to the social media "stream" in which the garden becomes a place of [[Digital Garden#^70bd0d|respite]]. Is it possible for the garden to be considered one's "back stage" - the place where one is free to decompress from information overload and take their time making sense of the "public"? I am leaning towards "no" on this, because I notice that notes I choose not to publish in my own digital garden are far less polished than those that I do, but it's interesting to think about how the digital garden identity is different from one's social media identity. # References 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_, _39_(1), 101–112. [https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551512470051](https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551512470051) Kasinitz, P. (2020). Rending the “Cosmopolitan Canopy”: COVID–19 and Urban Public Space. _City & Community_, _19_(3), 489–495. [https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12516](https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12516)