Goffman vs. Trilling: Sincerity and Authenticity

Consider two people who post the same photograph of a sunset. One stopped on a walk because the light caught her. The other walked to that hill because it photographs well, waited for the light, and framed the shot twice. Which post is more authentic? Most readers feel an immediate answer, and then feel uneasy about it, because the second person may also love sunsets. The question sorts behavior by its origin, and origins are exactly what a feed hides. The two critics below would give different answers, and the difference is instructive.

Two Diagnoses of One Itch

Erving Goffman, writing in 1956, treats the curated self as the ordinary condition of social life. Every person who enters a room performs for the people already in it, and the performance is judged by whether it sustains the situation, not by whether it matches a hidden core. A feed is a front stage with a very large audience. Goffman would not call it fraudulent. He would ask what expectations it satisfies and what backstage labor keeps it looking effortless.

Lionel Trilling approaches the matter historically. In his 1972 lectures, published as Sincerity and Authenticity, he traces how a moral ideal that once asked whether one's words matched one's feelings gave way to an ideal asking whether one had a self at all, and whether that self was one's own. For Trilling the online persona is not a new problem. It is a late stage of an anxiety that began when the older question of sincerity lost its footing.

The Stage Has No Hidden Truth

Goffman's central move is to remove the distinction between surface and depth as a measure of honesty. He notes that a performer may be fully sincere, believing in the act, or cynical, knowing it is an act, and that the audience's response depends less on which is true than on whether the performance holds together. The sincere performer is not more honest for being sincere. He is simply less aware of the machinery.

The curated feed is not a mask laid over a face. It is a set of expectations about what a face should look like, and the audience completes the fiction by agreeing to read it as a face.

This is why Goffman is so unsettling for anyone hoping that a truer self lies behind the feed. The backstage, in his account, is not a sanctuary of authenticity. It is a workroom where the performance is rehearsed and its inconsistencies are managed. Online, the workroom has been rebuilt as drafts, filters, and deleted attempts, and the front stage has grown to global size. Goffman's vocabulary explains the mechanics with precision. It says little about why the mechanics should feel like a moral injury.

Sincerity Asks Whether Words Fit the Heart; Authenticity Asks Where the Self Came From

Trilling's distinction is subtler than the slogan that sincerity is old and authenticity is new. Sincerity, in his account, concerns congruence: the speaker means what he says. Authenticity concerns origin: the self must be one's own rather than borrowed from a role, a class, or a crowd. A sincere person can be entirely conventional. An authentic person must, in principle, refuse convention. The online persona fails the second test almost by design, because its shape is set by metrics and by what other people already reward.

Trilling would also remind us that the actor was once the emblem of this problem. Diderot's Paradox of the Actor argued that the great performer feels nothing and therefore performs perfectly, which seemed to threaten the whole idea of an authentic inner life. The later Romantic answer was to make the self the source of performance rather than its product. Goffman quietly dissolves that answer: there was never a self apart from the performances that make it intelligible to others.

Where the Two Accounts Quarrel

The sharpest disagreement concerns the sincere performer. For Goffman, a person who believes in the role is simply doing well at it. For Trilling, that same person may be sincere and still inauthentic, because the belief was inherited from a script. Goffman would reply that no one invents a self from nothing, and Trilling would reply that the demand to invent one is precisely what modernity made urgent. Neither view is obviously correct, but they expose different costs. Goffman's account makes the feed bearable by normalizing it. Trilling's makes it painful by insisting that something has been lost.

If you found this valuable, consider supporting our work.

What the Feed Asks of Its Readers

The feed adds a further twist that neither author fully anticipated. Goffman's audience was present, and its reactions corrected the performer in real time. The online audience is absent, aggregated, and quantified, so the performer adjusts to averages rather than to faces. Trilling's authenticity was a demand addressed to the self. Today it is addressed to a metric, and the metric rewards whatever looks unrehearsed. The result is authenticity as a performance genre, which is the one thing Trilling feared and Goffman would have found unsurprising.

So the two critics offer different remedies for the same itch. Goffman suggests that the question is badly posed, since every self is staged and the only honest course is to understand the staging. Trilling suggests that the question is still worth asking, even if the answer keeps receding. The unease people feel scrolling through curated lives belongs to the second diagnosis, but the mechanics they are watching belong to the first. A reader who holds both can see the sunset photograph for what it is: a competent performance, and a question about why competence now feels like a confession.