An involuntary micro-signal made public by the platform's architecture: the visible trace of a reading that the sender would not have been aware of, had the system not decided to disclose it. From that moment, the wait changes nature. You no longer wait for a response: you interpret a silence. How much time has passed? What was he doing? Why didn't he write anything?
Editing precedes the text. Managing the impression precedes the impression.
Situations like this introduce into daily interaction signals of social self-correction that were previously much more difficult to observe. We no longer simply read others' messages: we read their relationship with the very possibility of sending them. Digital platforms have multiplied the readable markers of interaction —hesitations, revisions, disappearances, response times—transforming them into socially interpretable material. The environment itself tends to make more and more elements of interaction continuously open to interpretation.
It is in this sense that digital has transformed something structural: identity is no longer given, but made interpretable . We no longer manage merely an image of ourselves, but the interpretability of our micro-signals. And we do so knowing, at least vaguely, that others do the same.
A performance that already existed: Goffman and social life as representation
None of this implies that social interaction, before the advent of digital technology, was authentic in the naive sense of a social life not thematized as performance. Social life has always required self-control, modulation, and impression management . This is the starting point from which Erving Goffman began when, in 1959, he described everyday interaction as a form of situated representation: not falsehood, but mutual adaptation between individuals and contexts, audiences and situations.
Goffman described an interaction organized around the distinction between frontstage and backstage . On one side, the public performance; on the other, the spaces in which that performance could be suspended, corrected, and prepared. The backstage was not an authentic space in the absolute sense; it was simply less exposed, with a smaller audience and a shorter memory.
What's changing in the digital context is not the existence of social performance, but its legibility. The number of interpretable traces is increasing, and the visibility of the processes that produce it is broadening. Platforms don't eliminate the distinction between frontstage and backstage; they profoundly alter the conditions, making processes of revision partially visible and blurring the lines between contexts that previously remained distinct due to structural inertia—because there wasn't an infrastructure capable of keeping them simultaneously active.
When all audiences overlap: context collapse
The visibility incentives embedded in digital architecture—read receipts, presence indicators, and interaction counts—have multiplied the contexts in which performance is recorded, indexed, and reactivated. A message written to the most trusted person lives on a server we don't control. A story that disappears after twenty-four hours leaves traces in logs, in other people's memories, and in the algorithm that recorded the interaction.
In this theater without intermission, identity management faces what researchers call context collapse : the collapse of all audiences into one, simultaneously present. The colleague, the former high school classmate, the distant family member, the unknown reader: all in the same audience, all reading the same post, no one in the right place (boyd, 2014).
It's worth stating explicitly: this isn't an individual pathology. It's the structure of the system. But it's a structure that doesn't affect everyone equally. Those with high cultural and relational capital already know how to construct separate contexts, modulate their own readability, and determine what to make visible and to whom. Those who lack these tools suffer collapse without the ability to negotiate it. The Matthew effect applies here too: the system amplifies the resources of those who already have them.
Digital identity as a sedimentary deposit
Digital technology hasn't eliminated the multiplicity of contexts, but it has stratified them over time and made them simultaneously accessible. A researcher's LinkedIn profile coexists with comments left years earlier on a forum, with photos from a trip, with an opinion expressed during a long-forgotten political crisis. These layers don't alternate: they overlap, and anyone can navigate them vertically, retrieving previous versions of a person with the ease of a well-indexed archive.
Digital identity thus resembles less a theatrical performance and more a sedimentary deposit : layers accumulated over time, not always coherent, difficult to remove. And when they are removed, they often leave a trace of their removal. If the accumulation is largely involuntary—the effect of platform logic rather than conscious choices—the question that follows is whether an intentional alternative is possible. Choosing which traces to leave.
Silence as a communication signal
The central paradox is this: wanting to disappear is already a form of presence. Digital silence is not neutral —it is a communicative act. Not responding is responding. Not appearing is being present in the form of absence. Users, interacting within the architectural constraints of platforms, involuntarily produce interpretable signals—not by conscious choice, but as an emergent effect of systems optimized to maximize engagement (van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal, 2018).
But it is precisely here that an interesting space opens up. If silence is already communication, then it can be used as modulation rather than disappearance: a choice between what to make legible and what to deliberately leave opaque.
Towards opaque traceability
Goffman, in the less-cited but perhaps more insightful Stigma (1963), analyzed the techniques with which those who bear a socially complex identity manage information about themselves: they reveal selectively, control contexts, construct partial versions of their own history. This is not deception, but a situated management of social knowability —a form of information control that, read today, can be reinterpreted as a proto-logic of what we would call informational sovereignty.
Something similar is possible in the digital context. The goal isn't invisibility—unattainable, and ultimately not even particularly desirable. It's something we might call opaque traceability : being present without being entirely legible. Selective subtraction. Leaving traces that don't add up to a coherent profile. Subtracting not from the digital, but from its logic of identity optimization.
Just think of the Facebook profiles opened ten or fifteen years ago: photos from an Erasmus exchange, a comment on a forgotten political page, a tag from an evening that seemed irrelevant at the time. None of those fragments is false. But pieced together by someone who doesn't know us, they produce an image no one ever chose to construct. And even when it's deleted, the memory of others remains—in the memory of those who saw it, in the screenshot someone took without telling them. Opacity isn't an attainable condition: it's at most a direction of travel.
Negotiating with the system is asymmetric, and it's worth saying without euphemisms. Those who collect metadata don't offer a contract, they don't sit at the table. Lurking also produces social legibility, even when it minimizes the production of intentional signals. Opacity, more than a condition to be achieved, is a continuous negotiation with infrastructures optimized to increase user legibility. Acknowledging this doesn't eliminate asymmetry, but it makes the way we inhabit it more consciously.
What remains outside the logic of the profile
Backstage has never been a natural place—it's always been a construction, more or less conscious, more or less laborious. Today it requires more work than before, not because something has been lost, but because the system has become more effective at making it unstable.
The question is not whether to resist digital, but how consciously to inhabit it. Every choice about what to publish, what to keep silent about, what to remove or leave opaque is already a negotiation of identity . On the conditions of its exposure. This is what digital changes. And this is what a growing part of social life is focusing on today.
Rosaria Cirello
References
- boyd, d., It's Complicated. The Social Lives of Networked Teens, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014. (trans. it. It's complicated. Teens' social lives online., Turin, Codice, 2014.)
- Goffman, E., The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, Doubleday, 1959. (trans. it. Everyday life as representation, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1969.)
- Goffman, E., Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1963. (trans. it. Stigma. Denied Identity, Milan, Giuffrè, 1983.)
- van Dijck, J., Poell, T., De Waal, M., The Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018.
