Monitoring persona: mediatized identity and the edited public self

One of the key transformations in contemporary culture is the insistent demand to construct a public persona. Constructing a persona for navigating through life is not new; what is new is the naturalization of producing a mediatized version of this public self. The complexity of producing an online public identity involves the labour of monitoring and editing ourselves, connecting with strategic purpose to others and building recognizable reputations. This article both identifies and concludes that what we are experiencing is the work and relative value of producing a mediatized identity—a persona—which is a form of identity often linked to celebrities in our traditional media industries and now pandemic in contemporary culture.

Persona as method: exploring celebrity and the public self through persona studies

Researching persona is a study in the production, dissemination and exchange of public identity. One starting point in the process is to look at the production of the presentation of the self online, which allows for a particularly valuable way of exploring celebrity and public personalities. In order to advance on this point, this article examines three emerging and complementary methods of persona studies that work to capture different elements in the production of public identity. In the following we provide an introduction to the research currently being generated using three intersectional methods as a primer to the study of persona. We first present an adaptation of interpretative phenomenological analysis for the investigation of online identity as a means for understanding the strategic and negotiated agency that constructing a public persona entails. Second, we outline the potential for methods of social network analysis and data visualisation to contribute to the investigation of networked structures of public identities, and to further explore the assembly of a professional persona in the creative and niche paratextual industry roles enabled by social media. Finally, to explore reputation and relational cultural power we consider how persona is constituted by connections, adapting prosopography – an historical method for identifying relational status in a community – to the study of current public production of the self and relational reputation as a form of cultural field. All of these techniques are equally useful for the direct study of celebrity persona, and function dynamically together as means to access the wider dimensions of public persona.

Celebrity and public persona

Research on celebrity and public persona derives from fundamentally interdisciplinary sources. Although at its core, the study of public personality has been the object of investigations by those more closely associated with media and communication, the key disciplines of sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, political science, social psychology, and even anthropology and history have been part of its analysis. Celebrity identifies the “extra-textual” dimensions of the famous, in which the lives of the renowned are followed, read, and reported. It is a public celebration of individuality that is (but not exclusively) connected to consumer culture and democratic capitalism. Through these larger cultural tropes celebrity has had its strongest affiliations with the contemporary entertainment industries, particularly in terms of how they are covered by the media and the press for further value beyond the cultural forms that are often the origins of stardom—the public individual’s performances in fields such as film, television, sport, and popular music. Celebrity is a site of celebration and derogation in any culture: these public individuals are truly exalted and given a status beyond others, but they are also ridiculed for their believed-to-be unearned credentials for having such a public platform and voice. Moreover, the study of celebrity and public persona is also an investigation into the connection between the populace and these public personalities, where parasocial relations most evident in fandom identify how celebrities embody audiences with an affective connection that is truly powerful in contemporary culture. That power of embodiment and connection that celebrities possess is subsequently exploited by the media industries to promote and sell new connected cultural products. Identifying celebrities as part of a spectrum of public personas links the study of celebrity to the investigation of the celebrated and famed in a variety of professions and fields well beyond entertainment. Thus, the term persona is used in these studies of public personalities to acknowledge the mask that is deployed to present a public version of the self for this external consumption and reading by an audience, a collective, a network, a nation, a citizenry, or a community. Research into public personas has led to related studies of political leadership, self-branding, notoriety in business, and reputation management, and research delves into the presentation of the public self by greater portions of the populace in online cultures. Celebrity and public persona is a field in which research aims to investigate the significance and meaning of various versions of the public self in both contemporary culture and historically.

Understanding the emerging contemporary public intellectual: Online academic persona and The Conversation

At its core, the power of the public intellectual is the capacity to make ideas move through a culture. This article looks at what kind of academic persona – that is, what kind of public self whose original status comes from intellectual work and thinking – navigates effectively through online culture and communicates ideas in the contemporary moment. Part of the article reports on a research project that has studied academic personas online and explores what can be described as ‘registers of online performance’ that they inhabit through their online selves. The research reveals that public intellectuals have to interpret effectively that online culture privileges what is identified as ‘presentational media’: the individual as opposed to the media is the channel through which information moves and is exchanged online, and it is essentially a presentation of the self that has to be integrated into the ideas and messages. From this initial analysis/categorisation of academic persona online, the article investigates the online magazine The Conversation, which blends journalism with academic expertise in its production of news stories. The article concludes with some of the key elements that are part of the power of the public intellectual online.

I me mine: Artistic self/artistic persona

"This exhibition investigates whether there are places and activities that people consider" "more private, and more authentic than others. It also seeks to discover how people actually talk about their ‘authentic’ selves without recourse to academic theorization or speculation."

I me mine: artistic self/artistic persona

This work comprises of a series of video portraits and sound recordings that explore the connections between gesture, gaze and voice in video portraiture. Most of the subjects are artists represented in the current exhibition, but the disjunction between sound and image makes it difficult to categorically identify the authors of the sound bites on the work’s soundtrack. Designed to function as an introduction to the themes and issues generated by the Self/Persona relationship in the nascent field of Persona Studies, the work is also concerned with the presentation of the artistic self, and the ‘loss of self’ that may or may not occur as a consequence of artistic practice. Formally, the piece plays with the repetition and symmetry to underscore the vulnerability and mutability of the self within contemporary culture.

He's not there: velvet goldmine and the spectral Bowie persona

In broad terms, this paper examines what I call Todd Haynes' 'hauntological' approach to the celebrity biopic. More specifically, it focuses on Velvet Goldmine (1998) and argues that Haynes represents Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona as a series of phantoms in the Derridean sense. That is, figures that are both absent and present, material and immaterial— figures that affirm that no identity can ever be quite complete since the markers of identity are always enmeshed in a network of differences that can be continually re-coded. Haynes' original script contained several Bowie songs, which he was forced to replace when Bowie refused to give him permission to use the music (Bowie claimed he intended to make his own film about his Ziggy Stardust period). Undeterred, Haynes produced a movie that made no direct reference to Bowie by name, yet recoded Bowie's multiple personas and characters in a parallel cinematic world. Haynes' film invites the spectator to re-think Identity in terms of 'contamination' and 'inauthenticity'. He also establishes a genealogical connection between Oscar Wilde (one of the film's many spectres) and Bowie by making several allusions to the parallels between 19th century aestheticism and Glam Rock. In short, I argue that Haynes' film facilitates a critique of the idea that Bowie's shifting identity is merely a question of aesthetic choice, or an expression of any kind of cultural logic. Rather, I argue that the figure of the Derridean phantom offers a new way to read Velvet Goldmine, and to identify the cultural work performed by Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona.

Persona - an old public relations problem?

This essay uses the neologism citizen public relations to express a view of the phenomena examined by persona studies implying that public relations studies might be regarded as an antecedent discipline to the former. It goes on to suggest potentially intriguing differences and similarities to do with political and epistemological problematics. The central theme is that the term identity is simultaneously the key link and the key contrast between the two disciplines. This is because the term identity is usually deployed at the internal, psychological, subjective level by scholars of persona while it is usually applied to external, material objects and events by the public relations industry and its academia. The essay also makes the point that both areas of study can be unified as different species of the genera rhetoric in the traditional sense of that still older field. This coincidence and dissonance may invoke a debate which can lead to theory development in all three fields. The fields are not comprehensively surveyed – a process which would be lengthy and might bring up many contrasting perspectives. Instead the work of representative leading authors is presented to make a prima facie case.

The celebrity persona pandemic

The Celebrity Persona Pandemic explores how the construction of a public persona is fetishized in contemporary culture. As social media has progressively led to a greater focus on the production of the self, so this book looks at the most visible versions of persona through figures such as Stephen Colbert, Cate Blachett, and Justin Bieber, as well as fictional characters like Spock and Harry Potter. Ultimately, P. David Marshall closely studies how persona culture shapes our notions of value and significance, and dramatically shifts cultural politics.

The presidential persona paradox of Barack Obama : man of peace or war president?

On a wave of hope and rousing talk of building global bridges, President Barack Obama won office in 2008, in part on a pledge to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. In contrast to his predecessor, who launched America into long, costly and ineffectual wars, Obama was seen to be more of a dove than a hawk. However, at the end of his two-term tenure America has been in a state of foreign belligerence for all eight years, making Obama the longest serving U.S. war president in history.The political persona of Obama as a dove originated with his opposition to the 2003 intervention in Iraq while he was still a senator. This was then cemented early in his presidency with his 2009 speech in Cairo, which seemed to signal a profound and optimistic realignment of America’s intentions towards the Middle East and its peoples. This speech was a watershed in defining his political persona and was instrumental in his being the only U.S. president to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize while still in office. However, during his term the underlying political landscape of the Middle East changed significantly, with the withdrawal from then return to Iraq, the nuclear agreement with Iran, the increasingly chaotic legacy of the Arab Spring, the continued impasse of the Israel-Palestinian peace, the disintegration of Yemen and Libya and the rise of the Islamic State as the new threat in the political vacuum of northern Iraq and eastern Syria, and a resurgent Russian role in the region. All of these have provided novel challenges to Washington and a president attempting to live up to the positivity of his early days in office.At the end of his presidency Obama is faced with a public burned by the disappointments of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns and the new entanglements in the Middle East. This paper seeks to offer insights into the juxtaposition of Obama’s political persona and reality, as well as exploring what his political legacy might really be.

Person, persona

Person and persona are presented as conceptually at opposite ends of a spectrum. Person describes the internal dimensions of the self, while persona identifies the external and public presentations of the self. The article explores these ideas of person and public persona from their theoretical origins in media and communication research and how they are challenged and shifted by the way various communication technologies are used and deployed in contemporary culture.