A dramaturgical research on teachers' self-presentations in social media

Social media, which emerged with the development of new communication technologies, has changed one-way communication as a part of daily life, and has created a new form of communication independent of time and place, where everyone involved in communication can create and share messages. New communication technologies that eliminate the one-way communication of traditional media; A media world has emerged in which individuals interact by creating their own profiles on social networking sites and share what is going on in their lives with their followers. Today, social media platforms have become a way to interact with others. Especially in most of the social media tools, the feature of sending individual messages facilitated the interpersonal interaction and increased socialization. However, in the new media universe, individuals are trying to influence their followers by creating communities, creating domains, sharing opinions on public issues, and providing information about certain themes, skills and products. For this study, it was investigated how teachers use the signs of their various characteristics, skills and qualifications by focusing on how teacher accounts with large followers and influence on the social media platform Instagram, try to show themselves on social media. For this, Erving Goffman's dramaturgy theory was used. Goffman, in his studies and theory, attempts to explain the interactions that occur between people, stating that people make a deliberate or unintentional self-presentation. He observed that individuals control their own information and situations and explained the movements of individuals in society with theatrical concepts. Goffman's people act as if they were on a stage in public, that is, they put on a performance. This study consists of a research showing that interactions in social media can be explained by Goffman's dramaturgy theory. For this, 609 visual and textual posts shared throughout 2021 from 5 teacher accounts on Instagram were examined according to the Self Presentation Coding Chart created with the content analysis technique. The frequency and percentage values of the obtained data were tabulated and analyzed. In addition, the self-presentation tactics used by teachers around Goffman's standard expression equipment were exemplified in 15 contents drawn from teacher accounts. According to the findings, the posts made in the analyzed accounts are based on giving the impression that reflects the status of a teacher and maintaining the effect of this impression on the followers. As a result, in this research, it has been seen that the social media platform Instagram functions as the stage where teachers perform in accordance with their roles and the personal characteristics they are trying to reflect.