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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The definitive and first major text on personas in contemporary culture
Modern social media and communication technologies have reshaped our identities and transformed contemporary culture, revealing an expanded and intensified reforming of our collective online behavior. Billions of people worldwide are increasingly engaged in the production, presentation, and modification of their public selves—curating personas through various social media and fundamentally altering how we interact in the twenty-first century. The study of persona is essential to understanding contemporary culture, yet literature in this emerging field is scarce. Filling a gap in current knowledge, Persona Studies: An Introduction is the first major work to examine the construction, delivery, and curation of public identities in contemporary online culture.
This timely book helps readers navigate the changing cultural landscape while laying the groundwork for further research and application of persona studies. Three case studies are included—examining personas of the artist, gamer, and professional—to illustrate how personas continue to transform identity and reshape contemporary culture. From the historical precursors of the current iteration of persona to emerging configurations of public self, this unique work offers readers a broad introduction to the evolving theories and concepts of how persona defines the contemporary condition and its relation to technology and collective identity. To summarize, the book:
- Analyzes how identities linked to data are cultivated, curated and mined for various purposes
- Discusses the mediated blending of media and different types of interpersonal communication
- Explores tools for the investigation and analysis of persona, including Prosopographic field studies and information visualization
- Translates new research, concept, theories, methods, and approaches into clear case studies and applications
- Examines the personalization of public, private, and intimate information in the building of new personas
Persona Studies: An Introduction is an innovative resource for students, academics, researchers, and professionals in fields covering digital and social media, technology and culture, mass media and communications, social and media psychology and sociology, and professional studies.
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Seitenzahl: 533
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Table of Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
References
Part I: Conceptualizing Persona
1 Persona and Its Uses
Persona Studies and the Public Self
From Personae to Persona
The Premodern to the Contemporary Self
Applying Persona
Persona in Psychology
Persona in Literature
Persona in Performing Arts
Persona as Performance
Persona Through Personalization
References
2 The Contemporary Significance of Persona
Introduction
Intercommunication: The Human–Machine Interface
Celebrity and Surveillance
Intercommunication
Intercommunication and Affect Theory
Conclusion
References
3 Intercommunication and the Dimensions and Registers of Persona
Introduction
Persona as Individualized
Persona as Interpersonal
Persona as Indexical
Persona as Internetworked
Registers of Performance
Five Dimensions of Persona
Conclusion
References
4 The Collective Constitution of Public Persona
Micro‐publics
Microcelebrity
Surveillance Capitalism and Persuasive Technologies
Persona as Digital Objects
Digital Objects, Micro‐publics, and Hyperobjects
Digital Object and Autosurveillance
Conclusion
References
Part II: Researching Persona
5 Analyzing Contemporary Persona
Researching Ourselves: Reflexivity, Autoethnography, and First‐person Action Research
Interpreting the Public Self: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
Personas in the Making: Second‐person Action Research
Reputation and Inter‐related Persona: Prosopographic Field Study
Networked Selves: Information Visualization and Exploration
Conclusion
References
6 The Artist's Persona
The Artist as Subject
The Artist Myth
Romanticism and the Arts
Self‐presentation in the Myth of the Artist
Artist's Typologies
Authors, Auteurs, and Makers
The Artist as Creative Laborer
Online Artistness
Conclusion
References
7 From Player to Persona
The Role of Avatars
From Avatar to Persona
The Rise and Fall of the Gamer
Gâmeur: From Modder to Indie Game Developer Persona
Conclusion
References
8 The Professional Persona
Work, Public Identity, and the Concept of the Professional
Conclusion
References
Conclusion
The Research So Far
We Are Not Alone: Other Research and the
Persona Studies
Journal
What Still Needs to Be Done
Conclusion
References
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 A “prosopon” – Greek persona mask.
Figure 1.2 The Google ngram illustrates the comparative use of the term ident...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Springer's look, think, act spiral.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Rayna Fahey “Happy International Permaculture Day 2012,” Facebook ...
Figure 6.2 Stencil artist, Facebook post.
Figure 6.3 Stencil artist, identity obscured, Facebook cover photo.
Figure 6.4 Ben Mellor's “10 of the Best,” webpage.
Figure 6.5 Casey Sh, “obsessed with my vag,” Facebook post.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Characters Cuphead and Mugman featured in the 2016 indie game by S...
Figure 7.2 A screenshot of the 2016 indie game Cuphead by StudioMDHR.
Figure 7.3 A network visualization of the Twitter hashtag #screenshotsaturday...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Number of tweets per legal worker – tweets versus retweets, May 1,...
Figure 8.2 Number of tweets per legal worker, as proportion of total.
Figure 8.3 Frequency of word use in legal worker tweets, sans common stopword...
Figure 8.4 Frequency of hashtag use in legal worker tweets.
Figure 8.5 Number of original tweets per legal worker, and number of retweets...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Persona Studies
An Introduction
P. David Marshall, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour
This edition first published 2020© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of P. David Marshall, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
9781118935040 (hardback); 9781118935057 (paperback)
Cover Design: WileyCover Images: © FeelPic / Getty Images, © Semmick Photo / Shutterstock
About the Authors
P. David Marshall, PhD, is a professor and holds a Personal Chair in New Media, Communication and Cultural Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He has published widely in the area of public personality systems with his most recent books entitled Celebrity Persona Pandemic (2016, University of Minnesota Press), the coauthored Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories (2018, Palgrave Macmillan), the coedited A Companion to Celebrity (2016, Wiley) and Contemporary Publics (2016, Palgrave Macmillan).
Christopher Moore, PhD, is a senior lecturer in digital communication and media at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His research in game studies has examined the affective dimensions of first‐person video games and the role of screenshots and virtual items in the expression of gamer persona. He is a coeditor of the journal of Persona Studies and published work on machinima and adaptation in Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is the coeditor of the collection in Critical University Studies, Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education (2013, Intellect) and the edited collection Enchanting David Bowie: Space | Time | Body | Memory (2015, Bloomsbury).
Kim Barbour, PhD, is a lecturer in the Department of Media at the University of Adelaide. Her research looks at online personas and particularly focuses on the use of social media, and her dissertation “Finding the Edge: Online Persona Creation by Fringe Artists” was the first long‐form study in the field of persona studies. Barbour’s work has been published in Celebrity Studies, First Monday, TDR, and The Drama Review, as well as the edited collections The Digital Academic (2018, Routledge), Making Publics, Making Places (2016, University of Adelaide Press), and Media, Margins and Popular Culture (2015, Palgrave Macmillan). In 2014, she co‐founded the online open access journal Persona Studies, and continues in the role of managing editor.
Acknowledgments
This book has a rich and collective history in its formation. The authors wish to thank the many people who have been instrumental in building and engaging in this emerging discipline of persona studies. All our colleagues who have been involved in developing the related journal and the many people who have listened as we have developed the key ideas contained in this book – we are indebted to you and your support. We would also like to thank the Persona Celebrity Publics (PCP) research group and the emerging Fame and Persona Research Consortium (FPRC) where we trialed some of these approaches and how they intersected across disciplines. Our respective departments and colleagues at Deakin University, the University of Wollongong, and The University of Adelaide continue to support our research and writing. In particular, we would like to mention our appreciation of the work of Sharyn McDonald, Katja Lee, Lucy Moore, Glenn D'Cruz, and Rebecca Hutton. Wiley has also been very supportive in getting this book through all the stages to publication and we would like to thank in particular Elisha Benjamin and Catriona King. We would also like to acknowledge some of our colleagues from different parts of the world who have been particularly valuable in allowing our ideas to grow and develop: Brigitte Weingart, Bethany Usher, Barry King, Jason Karlin, Sandra Mayer, Helle Haastrup, Nete Kristensen, Stephen Moestrup, Gianni Guastella, Richard Smith, Joshua Greenberg, Celia Lam, Samita Nandy, Jackie Raphael, Tama Leaver, Annik Dubied, Brian Cowan, and Jing Xin.
David: I would like to thank my wonderful children Erin, Zak, Julia, and Paul for all their patience. I would like to convey a very special thank you to my beautiful wife, Sally, who is always so helpful, supportive, and loving. I love you and always will.
Chris: I am exceptionally fortunate to be a part of two wonderful teams who have contributed to this book, both the excellent and adventurous academics, Kim and David, and my patient and endlessly supportive family, Xavier, Harriet, and Lucy. My work on this book would not have been possible without the love and dedication of my wonderful wife, Lucy, who is the greatest of collaborators. Thank you.
Kim: Thank you to my wonderful mentors (David and Chris), and my family for demonstrating a generous, inclusive, and fulfilling intellectual life is not just possible but desirable and rewarding. Most importantly, endless gratitude to my partner Richard and daughter Abigail for their continual love and support.
Introduction: A Short History of the New Public Self
The odd paradox of research is that when one claims that something is new, it is the easiest statement to make and the hardest to prove. Every day, we are inundated with new information that claims something is profoundly different, whether an event which will change the course of history, a new miracle cure/drug for some human ailment has been developed, or maybe another herald‐like prophecy that predicts the end of the Earth. Perhaps this appeal to the new has accelerated with the way our attention is captured through online searches and drawn to images and proclamations that present “the most amazing,” “the most unbelievable,” and “the most outrageous” which dwarf newspaper headlines of the past and make us feel that we are perpetually seeing the world through the ocular lens of a Ripley's Believe it or Not tourist museum or a continuously updated Guinness Book of Records.
Nonetheless, new things and new practices do emerge; they may not be as dramatically different from the past as we might imagine, but sometimes change is both real and present. This book explores something we perceive as quite a fundamental change in the way that we negotiate ourselves through life. What we argue is that increasingly we are engaged in the production of a public self. On one level, this seems an absurd position to take. After all, are we not producing a public version of ourselves every time we walk outside and move into the public world of a street or hop on a bus or train? Our claim in this book is that this has expanded in some interesting and intriguing ways for us and that this production of a public self is actually connected to our techniques of presentation when we walk outside, but is put into different registers and modes. If we think of our various media forms as extensions of our culture – and specifically extensions of how we conceive of what is public – then any display of ourselves through different media is a formation of a public self. These mediated versions of public selves have defined our public sphere in various ways for more than two centuries and perhaps with less intensity for centuries prior. Collectively, we have read newspapers and magazines which have described the exploits of others. With more twentieth‐century technologies such as film, television, and radio, this description has become deepened, intensified, and made more representationally complete for us to construct not only a public sphere that makes sense and coheres, but also a collection of public individuals that we can identify, discuss, and critique in a relatively new way as if they are known to us.
What is now distinctly different is that collectively but in individualistic ways we negotiate a much‐shifted media and communication scape that produces quite different constitutions of public activity. In a sense, online culture, mobile media, and game culture which move between these spaces have produced an elaborate reconfiguration of what constitutes public and private space and activity. These changes have developed partly through what could be described as the “mediatization” of the contemporary moment. What we mean by mediatization is connected to the recent research on this area (Couldry 2014; Ess 2014; Lundby 2009, 2014), where different thinkers have expressed how various aspects of contemporary life – for example, politics and culture – are now seen through the lens of media which provides a form of legitimation and privileging of certain narratives and shared experiences. Our particular application of mediatization is to express how the formation of the contemporary self is now constructed and displayed through technologies and forms of expression that resemble media forms. In other words, we communicate through printed text, through images, through video and audio in a way that re‐constructs our identity through these various signifying systems. Playing games, texting, teleconferencing, video streaming and participating in Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest, WeChat, and Reddit and a host of other forms of connecting and communicating with others has produced an environment where individuals are collectively producing very elaborate versions of themselves. We will explore this development of mediatization further in Chapter 2 when we introduce the concept of intercommunication, which identifies the blending of media and communication as well as the highly mediated blending of different types of interpersonal communication.
To capture this constructed, fabricated, produced, and presented public self that goes beyond our past notions of a public personality or celebrity and becomes an elemental part of literally billions of people worldwide, we were drawn to a word and concept that expresses the very sense of the artifice of identity. The idea of persona best articulates this new technologically mediated but naturalized identity that we inhabit individually and collectively. Although the term persona has a long history of use that we expand upon considerably in Chapter 1, it is perhaps useful in this introduction to identify what persona is not, and thereby get closer to its value in understanding the way in which we engage and use online culture.
First of all, persona is not the individual.
It has all the appearances of being an individual, but it is in fact the way an individual can organize themselves publicly. Persona is a projection and a performance of individuality. This form of projection and performance is destined for some type of audience, some community and some collective. Thinking about how the collective is somehow part of this fabricated performance of individuality, identifies the second distinction that needs to be made about persona.
So, second, persona is not a collective.
This may seem an obvious point, but the distinction is important. Persona, in its appeal to a collective formation, embeds in its fiber the indexical signs of the collective itself. Persona then is essentially a way to negotiate one's self into various collectives. Thus a politician produces a persona that is an attempt to embody the cultural meanings of what his/her electorate might think of as, yes, a good politician, but also the accouterments of ethnicity and identity and status that will strengthen that appeal. The construction of persona individualizes this appeal to a particular collective. The complexity of this persona work is carried out by an individual in most cases, but as with politicians that are supported by political parties this persona work may be actually part of the job and responsibility of a campaign manager or press agent or secretary. For the other billions who are constructing online personas via social media platforms, this work – for, as we identify throughout this book, this has become a serious component of everyday labor that may or may not generate some sort of income or compensation – has become so normalized that it has blended into the flows of everyday life. In Chapter 2, and our final three chapters that provide exemplifications, we explore this kind of industrialized agency that particularly online persona expresses: where a contemporary individualized value is cultivated pandemically and relentlessly. In interesting and complex variations, a persona can inhabit a collective sense of self where a professional identity or a way of involving oneself in the games industry produces a formation of a persona across a shared group of people. Also, in some ways, contemporary persona identifies a new comfortability with inhabiting some configuration of a commodified self. This new constitution of public identity is often linked to celebrity.
And this insight underlines our third significant negative distinction: persona is not synonymous with celebrity.
This differentiation between the use of celebrity and persona is important for a number of reasons. First of all, it has to be acknowledged that celebrities have been and still are one of the best ways to understand something like persona. They are an array of familiar figures that we have given collective identity monikers such as stars, superstars, icons, cultural leaders, and political leaders along with a host of other variations of these terms. Celebrity identity is also fundamentally attached to media forms. The collective knowledge we have about our famous people is dependent on their mediatization: we see them on screens, we recognize their voices and mannerisms through similar technologies and we see them conveyed to us through third parties such as interviews and features in magazines or magazine‐like online fora. Moreover, celebrities are some of the best incarnations and examples of “industrialized agency,” a term that we are linking to the activity of persona construction and maintenance that millions upon millions produce and reproduce in daily rituals of online behavior.
But the differentiation between the concept of celebrity and persona is useful to understand. Persona, as a practice and as a formation of the public self, articulates a larger understanding of this move to mediatization, one that has become clearly more pervasive through the technological affordances of identity construction, sharing and “broad” and “narrow”‐casting that are now the commonplace and everyday features of social media use. Celebrity, despite its high visibility, is a subset of persona: in so many ways it articulates and expresses persona; but it needs to be underlined that persona goes well beyond the structures and experiences of celebrity. Celebrity is a particular formation of persona, one that from the now extensive analysis of its meaning can be seen as very much connected to various powerful media forms that have similarities to online culture but clearly some historical differences.
As we explore this space of difference between celebrity and persona, we now arrive at another negative proposition about persona. Persona cannot be completely understood as a contemporary and online phenomenon: it has clear precursors in public identity formation.
The public personas of celebrity, for instance, have served as powerful precursors of online personas. From the early persona studies research, one of the important values of celebrity is to see them as pedagogical tools for millions on how to structure a strategic public identity (Marshall 2006, 2010). The previous two centuries have provided models of the relationship of media to public individuals that are valuable sources for our understanding of persona. In the nineteenth century, as Stephen Gundle's (2008) work has revealed, the reporting and visibility of prominent individuals via newspapers and magazines originally helped produced the twentieth century's relationship to glamor. Glamor itself can be read as an outward depiction of the self for public display and its movement from film and fashion celebrity icons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into how individuals determined their own public comportment actually identifies the transformation of the public self, outside of the strictures of class and social position.
Delving further into precursors of the particularities of contemporary persona helps us shift from saying what persona is not to a more affirming and positive sense of what persona actually is and what this form of investigation allows us to explore. What is essential about persona is that it implies an interplay between the understanding of public and private.
This exploration of where persona fits into the spectrum of public and private is nuanced by investigating it historically. Persona is a Latin word and its precursor, prosopon, identifies that it was also a term employed in Ancient Greece and we analyze this in much greater detail in Chapter 1. What needs to be identified here from ancient history is that there has always been a play between what is depicted in the outside world – what we might call publicly – and what is somehow kept in more private spaces. As Hannah Arendt's work has underlined, Ancient Greek culture separated their domestic (oikos) sphere with different rules, orders, and etiquette quite markedly from what is presented in public (Arendt 2013 [1958]). The ancient Athenian citizen (it is always important to underline that this citizen was universally male and of course excluded other members [such as slaves] of the Athenian community) performed a public role and produced a relationship to politics and strategy that was quite distinctive and separate from the private world of the household – the domestic sphere as it was thought at that time. In other words, there was something discontinuous in the understanding of the personality of the individual from public to private and this was entirely acceptable (Arendt 2013 [1958], pp. 28–30).
A cautionary reading of how individuality itself was thought of in different epochs and eras and the ways these differences were instrumental in transforming the public stage of self‐presentation is necessary. Collective configurations of dress styles – a public display of the self – in different historical and cultural settings may have depicted gender, ethnic, group, job, title, and social position differentiations. Through these techniques the public presentation of the self was often behind the guise of collective identities. One can read the traditional ethnic garb as fragments and regularly used components that became, by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ways in which the emerging nation and nation‐state could express its collective identity. The relationship between collective and individual identity is complex and informs and layers our understanding of public and private.
Persona as a research focus aims to deepen understandings of the shifts and transformations of the relation between public and private as it is articulated through public displays of the self. The individual, through their constructed and displayed persona, serves as a complex mediating device that moves between the public and the private. What is fascinating in the current way in which online and social media persona is managed today is that we can actually observe, collect, and analyze these various ways that the personal develops, reforms, and reconstitutes over time. We can see the manner in which the intimate, the private, the quasi‐public, and the micro‐public of friends develops, a term that will be unpacked in detail in Chapter 4. We can also discern the interconnections that produce an even wider public through the elaborate network of sharing and exchanging that sometimes builds millions of viewers/users/sharers that can on occasion establish the significant power of an individual persona. YouTube stars such as JennaMarbles and HolaSoyGerman, among many thousands of others, embody through their personas this new form of celebrity‐like behavior.
This spectrum of public identity is a wonderful way in which people engage with others in the contemporary moment. However, this genuine beauty of pandemic persona work – what we could call the spread of both a new formation of a persona articulated through public personalization and a celebration of individuality in new collective formations – does have some more conflicting consequences. So, personas are produced through corporately owned platforms which require particular types of personalized information in order to become or remain profitable. In this book, we call the owners of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social media platforms part of the intercommunication industry. With a certain brilliance, these companies have set up a way in which individuals can have the sense of sharing with others, but also generate massive amounts of data about themselves that these corporations can legally mine, analyze, and directly share with other interested corporations. As companies,
they have moved successfully into the territory of interpersonal communication as phone companies have done for more than a century;
they have augmented this with the capacity to collect, organize and shape the flow and connection of that interpersonal communication by providing the pathways for more mediated feeds that are structured into this flow of communication; and
they have worked to highly target the individual and algorithmically associate them with an array of further feeds that are essentially paid messages or what the
legacy media
industry would call advertising.
As much as persona is imbricated in these very sophisticated intercommunication industries, it is equally valid to realize that as individuals construct their personas, they are increasingly aware that their data has been organized and shared for economic gain. As researchers in this area, we see one of the key storylines of this book is that the study of persona is designed to assist groups and individuals in the ways that they can negotiate and strategize their online persona.
To both research persona and to aid in the strategies toward strategically and tactically constructing personas, we have embraced a few related research traditions as well as connected to the kinds of public/collective personas that have been privileged as public identity markers over the last few centuries. As much as this last sentence is filled with our new (but nonetheless very important) jargon, it identifies that we consider “action research” incredibly valuable in the future development of persona studies. Action research has been advanced and promulgated in education studies in particular as a way for researchers to both conduct research and to help the subjects of their research toward better practices. As you will see in Chapters 5–8, we have explored a number of professional and recreational identities and how they are reconstructed into personas online. Our interventions in these various activities is specifically designed to be useful and ultimately applied by individuals and professional associations as their professions become reconstituted by the work of online culture and the parallel work and transformations of the intercommunication industries which are always part of contemporary persona making.
Connected to this work on making groups and individuals more aware of their persona work, our study of persona is also designed to familiarize researchers with how we can both conceptualize the kinds of labor – emotional, tactical, collective, strategic, economic, esthetic, and design work – that persona entails. As Chapter 6 explores, the techniques of phenomenological and online “listening” (Crawford 2009) can be an effective way to make sense of the substantial amount of work individuals put into their online personas. Similarly, but with a different emphasis, our approach to persona highlighted in Chapter 7 is also to develop visual graphics of how individuals and groups connect and this visualization identifies the tangible evidence of how online persona works.
Investigating persona is complicated. Our book acknowledges this complexity. First, it does so in terms of an awareness of how the historical constitution of persona is essential for understanding the contemporary online transformation. Second, it privileges the ways that persona's strategic and public individuality is in constant negotiation with the economic structures that now shape it in new directions in online and social media contexts. And third, we acknowledge the equally significant understanding that constructing personas is relational with others' efforts at constructing personas. Persona as a meaning system is dependent on what could be called prosopographic relations (Marshall, Moore, and Barbour 2015). Prosopography is derived from history of place and persons and literally means study of “an individual's life/career” from a close study of the “collective biography” (OED Online 2018) It is a study of the personal through various ways dress, documents, comportment, and objects established the relations of power and influence within a particular community or village. In a sense, our current work on persona is to investigate the strategies and the relational significance of strategies in the contemporary moment – with a full acknowledgment and genuflection to the millennia of persona construction in different contexts and structures of both communication and power.
This has been an exciting book to research and write and, we hope, an equally exciting book to read. Its subject matter identifies a transformation that builds from human history and its structure of public comportment, and translates that into the highly mediatized and screen‐oriented contemporary and pervasive public persona. Each of the chapters has a clear objective in its revelation of persona and the value of persona studies. Given the relative newness of the intellectual project, there is a particular logic in reading the chapters sequentially as the early chapters conceptually inform our applications in the later chapters. To give you a sense of this logic, this introduction will try to identify the significance of each chapter and their relationship to each other from beginning to conclusion.
Chapter 1 works through how persona can be conceptualized and draws primarily on how past research and historical work can inform this contemporary configuration of public identity. It begins with a reading of the contemporary way in which strategic public identities have been built and expressed in online culture. We acknowledge a cultural studies approach around both tactic and strategy and how this “art of making do” (Fiske 1989, pp. 25–29) describes the way individuals working in new collective and sharing configurations develop strategic and publicly directed personas.
From a cultural studies' inspired approach, the chapter then integrates key words and concepts into the investigation of the meaning and significance of persona. To make sense of these contemporary iterations, we move back in time and theory and integrate first the value of the ancient Greek and Roman meaning and deployment of the concept of persona and identify how this mask of identity is a useful path to explore our contemporary information and communication‐technology rich present.
The chapter then works through the related central theoretical traditions and key thinkers that have used persona directly – such as Jung – and others such as Freud who have implied the divides between different levels of identity formation. We also acknowledge the imagistic movement around persona that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century in literary movements associated with Ezra Pound, and to a lesser degree T.S. Eliot, as writers attempted to produce entities to express internal meanings of the self outwards.
Central to our use of persona is its connection to performance studies, specifically how the everyday was reconfigured by Erving Goffman (1959) into an expression of presentation. Important terms such as “frame,” “frontstage,” “backstage,” and many others express the sociological dimension of our persona work and construction as a collective reading of the public self that is connected via Goffman to the social theories around symbolic interactionism. The chapter concludes by extending and linking Goffman's approach to the emerging presentational media and cultural regime that is shaping a wider dimension of the personalization of presentation. Some of these personalization processes are linked to notions of individuality and public expression that have developed in particular ways for the last forty years and longer: celebrity culture, we argue has served as a pedagogical resource for the shaping of this wider and now online presentation of the self publicly.
As much as Chapter 1 integrates the historical and theoretical antecedents of persona studies into the contemporary moment, Chapter 2's focus is specifically on an interpretation of how online culture is forming this new generative development of a mediatized public identity that is literally coursing through the technological and communication veins of the world's many diverse cultures. Entitled the “Contemporary Significance of Persona,” it highlights certain recent analytical frames to interrogate the widespread phenomena.
Other concepts and terms circulate around and inform our work, but perhaps none is more central to the explorations in this chapter and beyond than the relatively new term directly derived from our work on persona, intercommunication. This term captures both the industrial quality of how people are organized into platforms and applications through social media use and the multiple levels of media, communication, and exchange that contemporary online culture siphons through the individual user. Intercommunication also provides the pathway for the chapter to explore the surveillance culture that is produced by these same platforms and their multiple redeployment back into economic, advertising, and marketing models of identity and exchange. Certain theorists are integrated into this study of the contemporary concept of persona including situating Foucault's work on the panopticon (1979), Deleuze's “societies of control” (1992), McLuhan's now dated but reinvigorated notion of the “global village” (1989), along with the recent scholarship of Alice Marwick through her exploration of status and influence in Silicon Valley and microcelebrity (2013), and Alison Hearn and Stephanie Schoenhoff's provocative critique of the “influencer” culture (2015).
Chapter 3 – entitled “Intercommunication and the Dimensions and Registers of Persona” – provides an expanded toolkit for the investigation and analysis of persona. It first explicates persona via intercommunication into specific elements – that online and intercommunicatively constructed persona is an individualized, interpersonal, indexical, and internetworked aggregated entity that is shaped by this particular industrial model as well as by the activities of social media participants. From this basis, Chapter 3 then works through the registers of persona – in other words, the prominent patterns with which people present and perform their public identities online. We have grouped these under professional, personal, and intimate registers. Augmenting this analysis are the five dimensions of persona, the first four of which are the public, the mediatized, the performative and the collective dimension of persona. The fifth dimension of persona for analytical purposes is what we have labeled the ugly neologism, VARP, which stands for the value, agency, reputation, and prestige dimension, an essential component that through its monitoring and internalization of value shapes billions and their constructing their public identities online.
In Chapter 4, we focus on the collective constitution of public persona particularly as it has manifested itself via digital networks. Persona, as we have tried to define it, is the movement of the individual into the collective, but intriguingly persona is neither individual nor collective. This chapter works through the new logics of this identity and the differing and transforming possibilities for individuals as they negotiate identities that generate value for an elaborate intercommunication industry that is also actively generating personas. As much as for us as players and participants in the various social media platforms as it is for the corporations who have provided the platforms for our forms of play and public identity construction, persona is a “quasi‐object” and not a subject: this form of object – borrowing from Latour (2005) for this insight and extension in our understanding of persona – produces forms of mediation in the social. The individual can produce “micro‐publics,” but it always has to be acknowledged that this form of production of the public self is also generating other versions of the public self that are used for quite different, but sometimes related directions. The data of the public self is something that the individual can attempt to monitor their use – what is called sous‐veillance (Mann 2004) – and also work to intervene in that form of monitoring. The complex combination of our willing acceptance of self‐monitoring through social media and wearable applications is a fascinating reconstruction of what our new collectivized self can be, and how our data produces multiple personas for different social and economic ends. The desire to make oneself into what is called a microcelebrity is a prominent way in which some individuals attempt to play in this space of identity for their apparent gain, while others work to block, hack, and transform the produced identities. Our persona work is realizing that these forms of public display of the self are data clusters, sometimes aggregated, sometimes linked to audience‐like micro‐publics, sometimes sold, sometimes visualized for different ends and goals, but always identifying the wider activities and engagement that persona identifies and our research into its quasi‐object status reveals.
Chapter 5 is our “methods” chapter as it charts the techniques that we have privileged and employed in our own studies of persona. As you might expect, some of the concepts and terms that we have used in the previous chapters that established the theoretical and conceptual dimensions of Persona Studies reappear and are situated in our move toward application. Our hope is that these analytical approaches can be adopted by others as they move into exploring persona in more detail.
Given the nature of persona – that it is something that we all employ for our negotiation into more visible and apparently public worlds – the chapter first acknowledges there is a need to see some of our work inspired by “auto‐ethnography.” Our approach expands from this base of insight and acknowledges the values of ethnographic techniques, but what we privilege is an approach to persona construction that is self‐reflexive. To capture that direction, we have called our technique of engagement first person action research where through deep analysis the exploration of the managed persona of the researcher provides the entry into the layers of digital construction, the connection to friends and followers, and the cross‐connection with the interconnection of networks and webs that reflect back on how we as individuals would like to manage our online selves better and with greater clarity. This method in our work has also been linked to interpretative phenomenological analysis(IPA) (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009) where open acknowledgment of active interpretation of actions by both researcher and subject is developed in the deep description and is the basis of our close study in Chapter 6. Our use of IPA is naturally with quite small samples and is located first within a deep understanding of the context of any individual's activities in constructing persona. Second, our IPA work integrates a reading of online activity and its persona creation that goes beyond observation into what Crawford (2009) calls “listening” – a combination of text, image, deployment, and the interactions that occur through and by individuals online. From that processual and interpretive foundation, this IPA method moves to in‐depth and unstructured interviews that assist our interpretation of what the individual is attempting to construct through their persona work. This research technique is also connected to second‐person action research, where we have managed others as they reported on their online persona work, but also talked and developed and exchanged how they were shifting their approaches to restructure their online persona partly as a result of our own surveys and workshops. This approach we have privileged in our current and future studies of professional personas and is dealt with in greatest detail in Chapter 8.
The chapter outlines a method we call prosopographic field studies or PFS and it has been extended into visualizing the social networks that personas are imbricated in both developing and maintaining. PFS starts with building the data about the interrelations of a sample population and how they establish roles, positions, and power hierarchies through their forms of public displays. It is designed to adapt this historical research tool to the study of both persona in history, but also extended to close studies of collective persona constructions and relations in online cultures and communities. Our final method explored in Chapter 5 is information visualization of our networked selves. Applications are now available to provide ways to show relative interactions of particular online personas and thereby establish the way that networks shape and convey public identity.
Chapters 6–8 are our applications of our methods to provide some exciting new persona studies research. It is our efforts at bringing the concept, theories, methods, and approaches into clear case studies and applications. Our work is exploring persona construction that has developed online and in many ways we are seeing the negotiation and blending of online and offline identities in this work.
In Chapter 6, we explore the fringe artist persona and how they have constructed their online identity. Building from the contentious and powerful “artist persona” that has historically positioned a spectrum of artist practitioners, the chapter maps how artists engaged in activities such as tattooing, craftivism, and street art actually produce a persona in this public and publicity‐centric world of online connection. The challenges of constructing registers of performance of persona are some of the most interesting elements of this work as the artists practice sharing and concealing aspects of their identities.
Chapter 7 tracks the long history of the affordances of games for experimenting with persona. It considers the tools that games have provided for circulating player personas in particular communities. The chapter then examines the impact of social media on the distribution of games across personal computers, dedicated consoles, and mobile experiences and the means by which these networked public platforms have allowed for the expression of a self as a player. It looks to the contested nature of the “gamer” and examines the dramatic transformation of contemporary games culture. The chapter charts the progression of the industry‐related persona, emerging from the user‐generated community of games modification and leading to the rise of “indie” games, not as a brand but a particular expression of a player experience outside of narrowly defined and heavily regulated genre boundaries. The indie game developer persona, is considered as part of a cultural expression of persona, as a “gameur,” which is symbolically linked to combatting toxic gamer culture and the provision of non‐normative game experiences by developers who are not constrained by the predictable demands of a mass media industry.
Chapter 8 provides a study of professional personas and how online culture presents challenges to the construction of an identity, the meaning of a particular position or job, and the way orbiting communities are also transforming what we think of as professions. It investigates the profession of lawyers, doctors, and academics predominantly and how they perform and navigate the perturbations of professional public identity in their online reconfigurations. A VARP analysis guides our professional persona analysis in the chapter and helps explain the shifting value and agency that are shifting our professions and their public presentations/performances of their positions.
This book represents a culmination of research into persona as well as a launching point for others to take these ideas and explore many other constructions of public identity. Although certainly not a requirement of reading this book, it makes sense to get the background fully in place by working through the concepts, new terminology, and ultimately the methods. This background is the material that will be nuanced as this field advances and we are encouraging all interested readers and researchers to engage and debate with our approaches on this strategic and now pandemic online identity we call persona. To further facilitate this exchange and research collaboration as well as recognize that we are building a field of study, the end of our book is not just the concluding chapter, but also a glossary of the terms we have generated as well as repurposed for our investigation of persona studies. You will also notice that words that are in the glossary are highlighted in their first usage in the text to help you navigate effectively through our work on persona and its contemporary transformations.
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Part IConceptualizing Persona
1Persona and Its Uses
Persona as a term and as an analytical concept has emerged from the close study of the performance and assemblage of the individual public self. In this chapter, the exceptional value that is inherited from multiple academic domains and disciplines is unpacked. Here, we account for the work in establishing persona as a term with a broad range of historical, intellectual, and analytical precursors. More specifically, we begin to account for persona studies as a toolkit for exploring the production of the self in the era of self‐presentation and presentational media. The key to this chapter is the exploration of what has altered over time, and what continues to change, in our cultures, communities, and interactions as a result of the digital technologies, networked media platforms, media services, and communication services that make specific requirements of us in the mediated assemblage of our public identities.
What propels the need for a detailed investigation of the movement from the personal to the public is clearly imbricated in the demands for an online presence in the contemporary period. Our online selves are deeply enmeshed within the economies of attention and the hierarchies of reputation that have acted to diminish the barriers between categories of the personal, the professional, the public, and the private. Involvement in any kind of public has always required a dimension of personal display, but now features a blending of interpersonal and presentational frameworks. The need for public identity management has simultaneously opened up access to complex and often intersecting online and offline publics, allowing for the creation of multiple “real” selves, each with their own roles, domains of participation, and fields of social interaction. We may be less formal with friends on Facebook than with peers on Twitter, or jovial and outgoing on Tumblr but guarded and careful on Reddit. Each instance differs from the others, or they may connect and be consistent across each platform, depending on the needs and practices of the individual.
Persona Studies and the Public Self
One of the major principles in the analytical toolkit of persona studies is the recognition of change in the complexity of individual agency in the contemporary moment. The concept of agency has historically undergone enough change to challenge a complete and categorical definition. However, the dimensions of agency as it emerged from cultural studies are core to the efforts of understanding that structural inequalities and unequal power relations are replicated by new media and communication technologies and their everyday application under capitalism (Green and Singleton 2013, p. 34). Agency has been recognized as an important function of social media platforms and services, including Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, as a means for regaining control over the information and representation of the public self, especially by celebrities, politicians, and public figures. As will be discussed in this chapter, social media has enabled the detouring of the desire for closer access expressed in tabloid consumption and paparazzi‐style images into a more immediate – if equally constructed – public performance that is grounded in the “official” status of the account user and its claims to the authenticity of the performance of the individual. This is a feature of social media with significant personal and political potential, recognized by postfeminist scholars as a form of agentic empowerment and a “call to authenticity” which also recognizes the surveillance properties of the social media platforms that are used to disclose constructed performance and self‐representations as an essentially “real” public identity:
The “call to authenticity” animates the idea that one participates successfully by disclosing on Twitter, so women are both lauded for being empowered through expressing themselves and criticized for the consequences of this display, enabling representations of women as enterprising individuals who willingly subject themselves to the gaze as a form of agency.
(Dubrofsky and Wood 2014, p. 284)
This is not to suggest that all users are treated equally or that new degrees of emancipation and equality are present on social media. One of the contributions of cultural studies to the work of persona studies is the understanding of the value of individual agency that is deeply rooted in the inequalities of power, gender relations, race, education, and so on. The critical work of Tizania Terranova, Dimitry Kleiner, Christian Fuchs, Mark Andrejevic, Mark Hansen, and Nick Dyer‐Witheford and others in political economy studies, including the integration of key thinkers such as Marx, Foucault, and Hardt and Negri, have detailed and expanded the analysis of social media beyond classical economics, particularly in the areas of surveillance, privacy, intangible labor and immaterial capitalism. One of the key trajectories we take for working with these concerns was recognized in John Fiske's Understanding Popular Culture as the “art of making do” (Fiske 2010 [1989], p. 28).
Preceding Fiske's work, in The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1984 [1980], p. 30) perceives “making do” as a motif for an esthetic dimension to the work of those whose individual creativity is constrained and enlivened by spaces that are generated by languages and practices that are owned, consumed, and dominated by forces out of their control. Even in the algorithmically policed spaces of YouTube copyright controls, Facebook policy takedowns, Apple iStore regulations, and government‐banned file sharing websites, the digital enables an unprecedented degree of boundary crossing between home and work, labor and play, personal and public. The elements of online circumstance therefore leave no choice but to exist in a mode of innovation and with a sense of plurality. This collective self‐sufficiency has influenced the work on methods in persona studies (Marshall, Moore and Barbour 2015) with the attention to the sense of agency in the practices of persona formation. We take on de Certeau's notion of the individual tactics and collective strategic negotiations as a way through the world, despite, or perhaps because of, rapid technological, social, and political change. The use of available resources and their dynamic application in the purposes of assembling an identity online is concomitantly individual and social. To understand the growing importance, impact on, and meaning of public identity in our lives, persona studies investigates the practice and ecology in which it is negotiated.
Much of the attention of cultural studies has concerned the collective configuration of meaning, and this is particularly evident in the examination of subcultures, fandoms, and the recent “participatory” turn to understanding the acquisition, translation, and iteration of cultural, digital, and social skills and competencies needed for full engagement in the twenty‐first century (Jenkins et al. 2009). Persona studies expands on the cultural studies inquiry to examine the movement of the individual into social spaces and the requirements on the public presentation of the self that this movement involves. The critical examination then becomes an investigation of how the individual gains and articulates agency within these spaces. Persona studies seeks to better understand to what degree and under what conditions must the individual negotiate, remix, strategize, and articulate identity formations in order to provide an account of the performances that both resist and stabilize the sociotechnical systems, platforms, and services that have contributed to the contemporary emphasis on public presentation. The reconfigured privileging of the individual in online culture as a participant (Jenkins 2006a) and gatewatching beyond the old media gatekeeping (Bruns 2005) makes this focus on agency central to understanding the complexity of the structures of power in the newly constituted era of networked personalization.
The work of producing an online persona involves the labor of identity management and the curation of a living archive of mediated information and ultimately “digital” objects. The conflation of the digital and the physical involves a series of moments and choices that we must reflect on, argues Stuart Hall (2001), and thus we need to look past the apparent randomness of personal collections to discern the crystallizing shapes and patterns of objects used for reflection and debate that require new tools for describing self‐conscious and self‐reflexive activity, whether it be the obfuscation of personal details in the Facebook profile or the contribution to a conversation via a Twitter hashtag. The living archive of an online persona is not “an inert museum of dead works” but an “on‐going, never completed project” (Hall 2001, p. 89).
An online persona is an event in its continuous illumination of identity, and whose gaps involve information as much as the more recognizable patterns of dates, actions, locations, preferences, and other personal data that emerges from any analysis of the online self. The living archive of online persona helps us to identify what our online cultures, communities, and interactions achieve and represent. For Hall, who uses Foucault's distinctive concept of the “archive” as an organic and mutable artifact rather than a unified or unifiable collection, the living archive assists in answering questions about these kinds of operations, processes and relations. The living archive of persona maintains discursive formations via a heterogeneity of content, from topics and texts, to subjects, tastes, and themes, which resist superficial attempts of grouping and classification that render them “the same” (Hall 2001
