Authenticity as the New Professional Currency: Performing the “Real Self” Online

When the Canadian sociologist and social theorist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1959, he described social life as theatre. People perform different versions of themselves depending on their audience, managing impressions to maintain a desired image. In today’s digital environment, however, that tidy division between front stage and back stage has collapsed. Platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok blur the boundaries between personal and professional life, turning everyday communication into a continuous performance.

This dynamic lies at the core of Sara Rusi’s master’s thesis, Performing Authenticity: Young Professionals’ Self-Presentation and Employer Branding on Social Media (2024, Arcada). Drawing on interviews and survey data, Rusi examined how young professionals navigate authenticity when posting about work online. Authenticity is the enacted coherence between one’s internal values, personal identity and outward self-presentation, experienced as the “real self” in a given context and perceived by others as genuine. In the context studied by Rusi, authenticity involves impression-management: users align self-presentation with internal identity while navigating platform norms and audience expectations. Many of the research participants viewed social media visibility as a career advantage yet hesitated to share content for fear of seeming “too performative.” Others leaned into humour and spontaneity, particularly on TikTok. Across both groups, authenticity appeared as both a deeply held value and a strategic choice — something carefully curated rather than purely spontaneous.

Goffman’s concept of impression management offers a powerful lens for understanding this. Individuals continue to perform, but as danah boyd (2010) notes, social media merges audiences that were once distinct — colleagues, friends, family, and strangers now watch the same act. A LinkedIn post celebrating a promotion or a TikTok clip about daily work must appeal to them all simultaneously. Authenticity becomes a balancing act between sincerity and self-presentation.

Media scholars Leah Scolere, Urszula Pruchniewska, and Brooke Erin Duffy (2018) have shown that people tailor their self-branding to the culture and affordances of each platform. The confident professionalism of LinkedIn, for instance, does not translate to TikTok’s informal humor. Rusi’s research participants displayed the same adaptive awareness, performing authenticity in ways that fit each platform’s tone and expectations.

Yet, as Duffy (2017) points out, this process involves emotional and creative labor. She calls it aspirational labor — the ongoing work of building visibility and credibility online, often unpaid and unacknowledged. Rusi’s interviewees described that very effort: the time, energy, and self-consciousness required to appear “natural” while remaining professional. Authenticity, it seems, is not the opposite of performance but another form of it.

Similar patterns are evident in higher education. Romero-Hall et al. (2024) found that academics use digital networks to balance visibility, transparency, and professional identity, facing the same tension between openness and impression management. Meanwhile, Leonelli (2023) demonstrated how students act as informal ambassadors when they share authentic glimpses of campus life online — posts that influence prospective applicants’ perceptions of universities. Whether in the corporate world or academia, authenticity serves as a form of capital that fosters trust precisely because it feels unfiltered.

For organisations, this creates both opportunity and risk. Authentic employee- or student-generated content can humanise an employer or institution, but authenticity cannot be scripted. It works only when there is genuine alignment between lived experience and what individuals are willing to share. When that alignment is missing, the performance feels hollow — and audiences quickly sense it.

If Goffman were observing today’s digital workplace, he might note that the backstage has all but disappeared. boyd would remind us that the audience has collapsed into one vast, invisible crowd. And Duffy would point out that even being “real” online is labor.

In this light, as Rusi’s work illustrates, authenticity has indeed become the new professional currency — one earned not through perfection, but through the convincing performance of being real.

Authors: Sara Rusi & Tomas Träskman

References

boyd, d. (2010). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). Routledge.

Duffy, B. E. (2017). (Not) getting paid to do what you love: Gender, social media, and aspirational work. Yale University Press.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday Anchor Books.

Leonelli, A. D. L. (2023). Exploring the impact of peer influence through social media on traditional-aged applicants [Doctoral dissertation, Northeastern University]. Northeastern University Library. https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu%3A4f22t138s/fulltext.pdf

Romero-Hall, E., Gomez-Vasquez, L., Forstmane, L., Ripine, C., & Dias da Silva, C. (2024). “Visibility, transparency, feedback and recognition”: Higher education scholars using digital social networks. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2024(1), Article 7. https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.842

Rusi, S. (2024). Performing authenticity: Young professionals’ self-presentation and employer branding on social media [Master’s thesis, Arcada University of Applied Sciences].

Scolere, L., Pruchniewska, U., & Duffy, B. E. (2018). Constructing the platform-specific self-brand: The labor of social media promotion. Social Media + Society, 4(3), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118786710