Digital Facework and the digital interaction order

‘Interaction’, argued Goffman (Goffman, 1983: 2), ‘can be identified as that which transpires in social situations, that is environments in which two or more individuals are physically in one another’s presence.’ Between brackets, he added that ‘presumably the telephone and the mails provide reduced versions of the primordial real thing’. Interaction was a label that Goffman predominantly reserved for 'face-to-face interaction'. In his own work, he excluded mediated communication on the basis of practical but not theoretical reasons (Moore, 2019). He did stress that both types of interaction are of a different order: ‘a telephone talk must first be seen as a departure from the norm, else its structure and significance will be lost’ (Goffman, 1964: 136). Ergo, he considered mediated interaction to be interaction that deserved scrutiny in relation to non-mediated interaction.