What is a presentational media regime? The contemporary breakdown in systems of representation

Foundational to both the operation and legitimation of our traditional media is the idea of representation: in some sense the images of television, the sounds of radio, the narratives of film, and the various public personalities stand in or in place of ourselves. Likewise our contemporary political system function as an elaborate representational system, where regions, "seats", electorates, the nation, and the nationstate are represented by individuals, parties and symbols. Although, there are differences between and among modern nation-states as clearly different political and cultural agendas are at play, the interplay of contemporary media, culture and politics has produced what can be called a 'representational regime' that more or less operates globally, albeit fragmented into national and regional groupings.

This paper explores the initial stages in the breakdown of this system of representation that has allowed a certain organization of culture and politics to expand and develop over the last two centuries. It acknowledges that central to this regime is something Nick Couldry has identified as "the myth of the mediated centre" (Couldry, 2003). What the paper argues, and therefore differs from Couldry's conclusion, is that there are cracks in the glue that holds the system together and they are emerging in the uses of new media. Through an exploration of presentational media - that is, media that is more involved with the presentation of the self for public/private and networked consumption than traditional media's effort to embody their audience in its narratives - the paper reaches for conclusions that identify a more elaborate legitimation crisis looming in our political and cultural worlds.

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.

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.

Дэвид Маршалл. Продвижение и предъявление себя: селебрити как символ презентационных медиа

This article explores how the celebrity discourse of the self both presages and works as a pedagogical tool for the burgeoning world of presentational media and its users that is now an elemental part of new media culture. What is often understood as social media via social network sites is also a form of presentation of the self, and it produces a new hybrid of the personal, interpersonal and the mediated — what I call “presentational media.” Via Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Friendster, individuals engage in the expression of the self that, like the celebrity discourse of the self, is not entirely interpersonal in nature, nor is it entirely highly mediated or representational.The middle ground of the self-expression described here (again, partially medi- ated, and partially interpersonal) has produced an expansion of the intertextual zone that has been the bedrock of the celebrity industry for more than half a century, and that has now become the core of social media networks. The article investigates this convergence of presentation of the self through a study of celebrities’ self-presen- tation on social networks and their similarities with patterns of self-presentation among millions of other users. The article relates these forms of presentation to the greater discourses of the self that have informed the production of the celebrity for most of the last century.

A second order control-volume finite-element least-squares strategy for simulating diffusion in strongly anisotropic media

An unstructured mesh �nite volume discretisation method for simulating di�usion in anisotropic media in two-dimensional space is discussed. This technique is considered as an extension of the fully implicit hybrid control-volume �nite-element method and it retains the local continuity of the ux at the control volume faces. A least squares function recon- struction technique together with a new ux decomposition strategy is used to obtain an accurate ux approximation at the control volume face, ensuring that the overall accuracy of the spatial discretisation maintains second order. This paper highlights that the new technique coincides with the traditional shape function technique when the correction term is neglected and that it signi�cantly increases the accuracy of the previous linear scheme on coarse meshes when applied to media that exhibit very strong to extreme anisotropy ratios. It is concluded that the method can be used on both regular and irregular meshes, and appears independent of the mesh quality.