Persona Studies

An Introduction

P. David Marshall, Christopher Moore, Kim Barbour

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781118935071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Part I
Conceptualizing Persona

1
Persona 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, p. 90). Each point on the network, each user profile and service account, from Netflix and Skype, to WhatsApp and Tinder create nodal points in the larger picture of activity that informs the network of our behaviors and collectively, and most often algorithmically, determines how we appear to others. Foucault drew attention to the apparently continuous forms and fields that are indicated by gaps, differences, interplay, distances, transformations, and unpredictable departures, and the “trick,” suggests Hall, is not to allow the “oeuvre of a mythical collective subject” to dominate the description, but rather convey a sense of regularity and difference in accounting for its dispersion. It is a mistake to think then that we might tie down an account of persona, or a persona, that is immune to change.

From Personae to Persona

One of the changes that was often noted during the early subdisciplinary formation of persona studies was t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Conceptualizing Persona
• Part II: Researching Persona
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index
• End User License Agreement