Performing “Digital Citizenship” in the Era of the Blind Spot Becky K. Becker (bio) In 1998, when President Bill Clinton was on his way toward impeachment hearings following the Whitewater investigation and subsequent Starr Report, many of us shrugged off his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky as “none of our business” and “unrelated to his work as president.” In retrospect, and particularly in light of the Me Too movement, the longer view on this moment in history has changed dramatically. For some, performances of citizenship at that time now appear myopic and unempathetic toward the one person who should have garnered the most compassionate response at the center of the scandal: Monica Lewinsky. Still, it is worth remembering that many Americans performed our citizenship prior to the turn of the twenty-first century by assuming that even the president of the United States should have a private life. Perhaps this was our blind spot. More than twenty years later, everything has changed. While we still manage to have private lives in between our posts, vlogs, and tweets, our social media presence has become increasingly politicized. Whether we choose to engage in the political process or not, as individuals we seem to perform our citizenship in a very public way via social media. Given this shift toward “sharing,” I am interested in examining the ways in which we perform our citizenship online. How do we choose to represent ourselves? With whom do we align? How do we perform those alignments? How willing are we to gather information in an unbiased manner, weigh facts, and make conclusions that blur the lines of party and politics? And how might this performance contribute to the current state of American politics, which is not really “politics” in the historic sense at all? Although I have conducted traditional research regarding digital [End Page 56] citizenship and its performance, this piece moves somewhat fluidly between theory and reflection. Most of my social media research was done on Facebook—or “mombook,” as many of my students call it— conducted somewhat sporadically over the past several months. However, the ideas explored have been developed over the past several years while observing our country’s descent into the divisiveness that currently characterizes our national dialogue. I do not think it is hyperbolic to note that now more than ever, the personal is political. In a time when the national stage has become fraught with more personal attacks than actual facts, it is difficult to refrain from taking our politics too personally. Another blind spot. What does it mean to be a digital citizen? Do we engage in cyber citizenship simply by making posts or tweets that reference a particular political party? Or does “enacting ourselves in cyberspace”1 involve more complicated representation than party alignments would suggest? According to Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert in Being Digital Citizens, “to understand what it means to be digital citizens requires theorizing between digital life (and its digital subjects) and political life (and its political subjects). Both are simultaneously undergoing transformation, and understanding the dynamics of these changes is a challenge.”2 Considering this description, if we can postulate that “political subjects” refers to individuals engaged in political acts and relationships, then we can also infer that digital citizenship is a dynamic, evolving state of being (or not being), dependent upon factors both digital and embodied. In contrast, as theatre artists, our understanding of performance is likely to assume the embodied presence of the performer. Given the vitality of the physical body within live performance, Isin and Ruppert’s appreciation of the interplay between digital life (think cyberspace) and political life (think embodied space) may be useful in describing digital performances of citizenship.3 Equally valuable is Erving Goffman’s Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life, in which he likens daily interactions to theatrical performance. For Goffman, such exchanges are face-to-face and involve the incorporation of a “front” or, as he describes it, “expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual.”4 Interestingly, Goffman’s discussion of “front” in the context of daily performances is reminiscent of cognitive scientists George...