Digital character contests: on the making of behaviour, responsibility and responsible behaviour in digital health and wellbeing

Erving Goffman's sociology of face-to-face behaviour is best known for his dramaturgical perspective highlighting how social actors present themselves in everyday life (Goffman 1959), how stigma concerns the concealing of discredited or discreditable information (Goffman 1963), or how the agency of inmates is drastically limited in total institutions by ‘interpretative schemes’ (Goffman 1961). In this paper I want to develop the concept of 'digital character contests', based on the 'character contests' concept coined by Goffman's 1967-essay 'Where the action is'. This concept is highly fertile to better understand how in digital societies individual behaviour, responsibility and responsible behaviour of persons is constituted through the tracing, assembling and acting upon one's character.