My Word! Chapter Three

Observing the Performance Self

Throughout the chapter, something one of my teachers talked about kept coming to mind. During one of his classes, he brought up the term ‘code switching’. His explanation was that we talk and act differently when we are with different people, and in different environments. When he asked the class ‘who does not think they code switch’, a lot of people raised their hands. Then, he asked people to think about the way they talk to their friends, and see if they use the same terms, and attitude when talking to their teachers/parents/elders. When he asked the question again, no one raised their hand. I think his explanation is another way of talking about the performance self. To me, authentic self is being true to one’s inner self. The authentic self would not let others pressure them into doing things that go against what they wanted to do or what they believe in. Where the performance self may be an instinct, or a purposeful reaction.

I do not see myself as a performance self, or an authentic self. It feels as if the two are two ends of a spectrum (I took way too many science classes. . .) where I feel that I am somewhere in the middle. While I try to be as true to myself as possible, I know for a fact that I act differently in different situations. I act differently to someone I just met versus a childhood friend, and there are some people in my life who I tend to ignore most of the time. Before reading the article about performance self, I would have probably said that I am an authentic self, but after reading the article, I will stick to the grey area between the two.

My reaction to Blum's statement on p. 89 that "The performance self is more prone to cheat and plagiarize than the authentic self . . . For a performance self, intellectual property is a quaint yet meaningless notion." so I copied this from the 114 blog):
The chapter points out that there is an emphasis on grades, and impressing teachers (or people’s bosses). To address the emphasis on grades now a day, there are teachers who like students to have multiple sources in their papers to show that they did their research, while there are also some who want the students to show that they were in class (there was a girl in the chapter whose philosophy teacher was like this). There are some cases where the performance self is encouraged to use other people's ideas and the only thing that saves them from plagiarizing is their citation or what their teacher thinks. I agree that there are some students out there that believe that they are forced into cheating or plagiarizing.

As Susan Blum says, the authentic self and the performance self are models, and let’s face it, there are very few things in life that follows a model (no matter how much we wish it would . . . unfortunately). So I guess this is one of those times when it is alright for me not to be able to make up my mind.