The spectrum and the spectre of the public self : persona studies

One of the most intriguing elements of the study of celebrity is the complex relationship between the renowned individuals that have celebrity status and the populace. In past work, I have identified how celebrities “embody” audiences producing a kind of audience-subjectivity that is both collective and individual. If our media systems are producing slightly different collective configurations and quite different ways in which individuals exhibit and share, this relationship between the individual and the collective so foregrounded by celebrity culture may be differently constituted. This presentation will look at how the celebration of the self is played out now across culture in variations of the social and para-social structures of celebrity culture, in professional settings and what would be seen as forms of online leisure and recreational activities. In one sense, this is the spectre of celebrity that has now been virtualised by individuals and their forms of public display. In another sense, we now have a very diverse range and spectrum of public personalities which demands a more extensive analysis of the constitution of public persona, where the embodiment of collectives and the articulation of identity forms for different purposes and objectives produce via a series of micro-publics a substantially different public sphere.

Persona studies: mapping the proliferation of the public self

Celebrity has developed into a particularly powerful and pervasive trope for contemporary culture. It works at organising what we perceive as significant and this is made evident through its permeation of what constitutes news. Similarly, celebrity has been well documented in terms of its capacity to shape our entertainment: stardom is at least one of the cultural economies in which our stories and fictions are selected or read and recreated in popular culture. This article argues for the development of persona studies, where research on the celebrity is a subset of a wider study of how the self and public intersect and produce versions and identities that in some way continue to support the wider demands of our work economies.

Persona to persona studies

 A foundational review and study of the emergence of persona studies from online culture and the concept of persona, the article explores the past and current directions in research. It serves as a form of introduction to the concepts of both persona and persona studies.

Making intellectual room for persona studies: a new consciousness and a shifted perspective

It is an enormously difficult—and perhaps impossible, but ultimately important—task to comprehensively define the contemporary moment through a particular concept. This introduction and this journal make the claim that both in a pervasive way and to a pandemic extent, there is enormous activity and energy in the production, construction, and exhibition of personas. Something quite extraordinary has shifted over the last twenty years that has led to this intensive focus on constructing strategic masks of identity. The catalyst is the development of online culture and its invocation to personalize the expression of a public self—essentially a persona—regularly and incessantly. This culture of producing and monitoring our public selves is the focus of this journal as online culture blends with everyday culture and leads to an insistent proliferation of personas for both presentation and for strategic purposes in order to manage very new notions of value and reputation. The task of investigating persona is complex, and is dependent on connections and intersections across an array of disciplines. This journal and the field of Persona Studies is designed to serve as a site for this essential work of comprehending, analysing, and critiquing persona, and to allow disciplines to intersect, exchange ideas, and debate the play of persona historically and 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.

Finding the edge : online persona creation by fringe artists

Self-presentation through the creation of profiles and pages on digitally networked spaces is becoming ever more ubiquitous. In order to develop greater depth of understanding of the place of social media in our self-identification practice, my dissertation investigates the experiences of online persona creation by eight artists. Drawing on sociological and cultural studies approaches to understanding identity as performance, I tie current artists’ presentational and representational practices to historically grounded, socio-culturally constructed discourses of ‘artistness’. Through this connection, I argue that the creation of online persona has not radically changed notions of what it means to be an artist, or how artistness is represented and understood by audiences of fans or followers, but rather that digital technology has allowed for renegotiation of the boundaries of artistness that still draws from historical understandings of the role and persona of the artist. This shifting of boundaries, allowing for more inclusivity within the art world, is demonstrated by my focus on ‘fringe’ artists: those whose creative practice places them outside of the traditional art world and its existing structures of representation, distribution and consumption. The eight fringe artists who participated in this study are drawn from street art, performance poetry, craftivism and tattoo.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis drives the methodological focus on the experiences of the artists. Rather than a consideration of behaviour and habit, or what the artists do, this phenomenological approach allowed me to instead focus on what it is like for the artists to create persona, what drives particular types of representational practices. Using unstructured interviews, and online listening as an extension of participant observation, the artists’ narratives of experience are expressed through transcript extracts and screenshots: both are necessary to fully explore the nature of online persona creation.

My analysis of the artists experiences has demonstrated that there are three somewhat distinct registers of performance with which an artist’s persona can engage: the professional register, where one demonstrates ones proficiency, experience, popularity, and professionalism; the personal register, where one connects with
wider social and political interests and activities; and the intimate register, where one allows the audience in to one’s private world. These three registers occupy the same performance space, but are implicitly or explicitly for different segments of the digitally networked audience of fans, followers, friends and family. The complexity of the performance and reception of these registers is influenced by the shared nature of the performance space – where previously different roles would be performed for different audiences without reference to one another, the networked nature of online social media influences decisions of how much, and when, to share with whom.

Interpreted here using themes of strategy|happenstance, specialisation|diversification, visibility|self-protection,
self|others and work|play, the professional, personal and intimate registers of performance enable us to see the consideration and care with which each participant creates their artists persona. The experiences of performing the self in these three registers, as presented here, provides an insight into the complexities involved in creating online persona, while also demonstrating that this type of presentation of self is, in itself, no different from the types of role play and performance of self that has arguably always occurred in our physical world. Despite focusing on the role and performance of artistness, this dissertation speaks to the creation and performance of online persona more broadly. 

Darkly dreaming (in) authenticity : the self/persona opposition in Dexter

 In ‘Darkly Dreaming (in) Authenticity: The Self/Persona Opposition in Dexter,’ Glenn D'Cruz uses Dexter Morgan, the novelised serial killer and Showtime TV anti-hero to examine the connections between self and persona and the discourse of authenticity. D’Cruz foresees a series of challenges for persona studies and considers key concerns ahead, in terms of the critical vocabulary and scholarly agenda and addresses the need for critical genealogy of the term ‘persona’. 

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.

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.

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.

Recognition culture (blog)

In response to Stuart Hall's Kilburn Manifesto where Hall considers celebrity culture as one of the inhibitors in forming a new political collective and agency, this article explores what it labels as a politics of recognition and a recognition culture and the different ways the current generation of the technologies of the social produce different formations of collectives.

Hiding in plain sight: street artists online

Identity and privacy concerns related to social media are the subject of widespread academic enquiry and mass media reporting. Although in most circumstances academic research tends to present identity play and online self-presentation as positive, media reporting in Australia makes much of the risks of identity theft, privacy breaches and online predators. This research explores the phenomenological experience of creating an online persona, focusing particularly on street artists. For street artists, the threat of unwanted exposure has to be balanced with the positive implications of sharing their creative work outside its geographical and temporal constraints. I argue that street artists use complex persona-creation strategies in order to both protect and promote themselves. The two street artists discussed in this article experience their engagement with social media and digital networks in ways that offer new insight into the opportunities and problems associated with the presentation of a persona online.