university setting. Among a thousand first year students some will undoubtedly know each other beforehand, but on the whole everyone will be on their own and looking to make friends. Martin is walking proudly to his first class trying to impress everyone. But if Martin was to make a mistake in his self-presentation now, he could take several weeks to recover his credibility. The process of establishing social identity, then, becomes closely allied to the concept of the "front," which is described as "that part of the individual's performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance" (22). The front acts as a vehicle of standardization, allowing for others to understand the individual on the basis of projected character traits that have normative meanings. As a "collective representation," the front establishes proper "setting," "appearance," and "manner" for the social role assumed by the actor, uniting interactive behavior with the personal front (27).
             A student will often act differently when talking to someone in his lecture, than he will with his friends in the bar later that night -the former providing a sense of intimacy, the latter a more public occasion. Goffman discusses the need for belief in the part you are playing, both in terms of the audience, and in terms of the performer himself. For the performance to appear credible the performer himself should believe the performance is genuine; the alternative is have no belief in the performance, to be what Goffman terms a "cynic" -someone who is deliberately seeking to mislead his audience (18). If the student genuinely believes he is an easy going guy who doesn't worry about work, he may appear sufficiently credible to overcome any of the apparently contradictory evidence of the impression given off.
             When there is little or no occasion for "dramatizing" the performance the student wil...