PERMISSIONShttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ This paper explores the way individuals are part of the prestige economy generated by universities as institutions. It explores how the construction of online identities or persona is now an essential activity for the academic both from the perspective of university value and individual/career value. Five distinct types of academic persona are explored primarily through academics working in digital communication areas; through these cases and examples this new communication environment is explored. This paper concludes that institutions and individuals need to develop in the most pragmatic sense, online academic persona and ensure that these online 'selfs' are connected with authenticity to the professional work of the academic.
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.
Before Facebook, Twitter, and most of the digital media platforms that now form routine parts of our online lives, Jay Bolter (2000) anticipated that online activities would reshape how we understand and produce identity: a 'networked self', he noted, 'is displacing Cartesian printed self as a cultural paradigm ' (2000, p. 26). The twenty-first century has not only produced a proliferation and mass popularisation of platforms for the production of public digital identities, but also an explosion of scholarship investigating the relationship between such identities and technology. These approaches have mainly focussed on the relations between humans and their networks of other human connections, often neglecting the broader implications of what personas are and might be, and ignoring the rise of the non-human as part of social networks. In this introductory essay, we seek to both trace the work done so far to explore subjectivity and the public presentation of the self via networked technologies, and contribute to these expanding accounts by providing a brief overview of what we consider to be five important dimensions of an online persona. In the following, we identify and explicate the five dimensions of persona as public, mediatised, performative, collective and having intentional value and, while we acknowledge that these dimensions are not exhaustive or complete, they are certainly primary. KEY NODES OF RESEARCHThe scope of research in this field is wide and varied, fruitfully informed by multiple disciplinary perspectives. Here we trace only a handful of scholars and concepts, focusing in particular on work that is foundational or influential in our formulations of the dimensions of online persona. Harrison Rainie and Barry Wellman (2012), for example, advance the notion of 'networked individualism', which helps to acknowledge and account for the connections between online activity and the formation of subjectivity. They remind us that communication technologies, media platforms, and digital services are not isolated objects or discrete entities, but are voraciously incorporated into the lives of individuals as part of the extant identity assemblage that is undergoing continuous revision, updates, and patching as we form connections and exchange information with other people and other systems. Zizi Papacharissi's (2010) media and communication perspective presents us with another elaboration of the 'networked self', a term which she uses to indicate the construction of a subjective performance across multiple and simultaneous streams of social awareness that expands autonomy, potentially reduces agency, and which requires constant self-surveillance and monitoring.
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.
<p>In the last issue’s editorial, “Five Dimensions of Online Persona” (Moore, Barbour and Lee 2017), we turned our attention to the proliferation of public identities through online platforms, and traced key nodes of research that inform how we think about and theorise online personas. We also proposed and outlined five primary dimensions to the online persona that we characterised as public, mediatised, performative, collective, and having intentional value. The scope of that work was deliberately broad and far-reaching—we envisioned that piece as neither tool nor template but, we hoped, a conceptual starting point for further thinking and research.</p><p>In this editorial we seek to continue that work by putting these theoretical foundations and concepts into practice through a study of the persona work of Instagram. This work constitutes, in many cases, significant labour: decisions are made and remade around sharing different types of images, along with the use of hashtags, framing, timing, filters, captions, or tags. Abidin (2016, p. 90) describes this as “visibility labour”, which is “the work individuals do when they self-posture and curate their self-presentations so as to be noticeable and positively prominent” to their audiences or micro-publics, and notes that the labour itself becomes invisible in the persona creation process. This distributed visibility labour forms the basis of persona work, where users and their micro-publics, in conjunction with the platform and the algorithms that drive it, are continually iterating on the persona that is produced. </p>
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