Persona studies: Mapping the proliferation of the public self

Introduction

There is a relationship between news and celebrity and it is a nexus that is worth studying, exploring and investigating. There is something about celebrity news which is indeed an oxymoron. Celebrities are ephemeral, of little value, a distraction. It is a bizarre tension: we consistently denigrate their value and at the same time elevate their significance in terms of time, energy and focus. Is this focus on celebrity in news forms misguided and perhaps more a sign of the decadence of a culture that cannot screen and filter what is important from what are the flotsam and jetsam of the day? Are these the signifiers which signify the decline of a culture, an inept culture, a culture susceptible to bizarre beliefs in value that fuelled the eventual global financial crisis among other issues and problems in the contemporary world? Or perhaps what the focus on celebrity identifies is the illusory objective of rationality that, despite all the efforts at providing the material and information for an informed citizenry, we are drawn to emotional connections that express another force of organisation, interest and connection. News by its very form itself implies disorder as opposed to order, of surprise and novelty that somehow tread a line between the rational and the irrational – a line that intersects well with the following of celebrity culture.

In this article, I want to identify that there is something in the study of celebrity that is in effect a subset of a larger area of significant and needed inquiry. The endpoint of this article is a different kind of manifesto – a manifesto for something I am calling ‘persona studies’. What persona studies entails is that increasingly we are seeing the publicisation of the self. News and journalism have been explicitly and implicitly involved in the reportage of the public self and instrumental in the expansion of its reach and significance and I detail this proliferation and expansion below; but what is critically different is that the public self is expanding and proliferating as an increasingly normal activity for a larger and larger percentage of the population. Associated with this expansion is a similar development of what I develop further as ‘micropublics’ which become the usual or mundane dimensions of any particular configuration of the public self.

The celebrity news nexus

The impetus behind the proliferation of the public self has a number of sources, but one of the central tropes is in fact the expanding celebrity discourse itself, something that has been growing in news coverage for many years. The ubiquity of celebrity is quite profound. It can be charted over a longer period, but it suffices to identify that it has rarely contracted. Celebrity news has become normalised in newspapers. From the 1970s, the expansion of lifestyle sections and the development of pull-out entertainment ‘magazines’ ensured that the stories devoted to the famous were regularised in interview after interview. Perhaps more important was the migration of celebrity stories from the back-sections to the front pages of newspapers. To give a recent example that underlines the normalcy of this kind of reporting, one can see the high visibility given to the announcement of the filing for divorce by the actress Katie Holmes from her husband-actor Tom Cruise. Not only did it occupy some component of the front page in most major newspaper markets, it led the reader to background reports that gave a text and pictorial legacy of their relationship. People magazine (Heyman, 2012) was credited with breaking the story on 29 June 2012 at 1 pm and it circulated via the newspaper and entertainment websites shortly thereafter. For example, it was reported in the New York Times ‘Arts Beat’ by 5:22 pm (Pogrebrin, 2012). In their online formats, newspapers provided links to the various video-captured moments of their courtship – from Tom Cruise’s couch-jumping on Oprah in 2006 in his declaration of love, to his proposal on the Eiffel Tower. Gossip and news collide in this coverage as a growing celebrity news nexus has developed.

The natural news home of celebrity stories has traditionally been magazines. Throughout the 20th century, film, radio, popular music and television have been supported through an elaborate array of magazines that have generally focused on profiles of stars, from the original Moving Picture World and the picture-profile magazines of the mid-20th century of Look and Life, to the women’s magazines that blended domestic scenes of stars with other domestic lifestyle tips. By the middle of the last century, what had also emerged was a clear industry of what were called supermarket tabloids which blended bizarre fabricated stories with sensational gossip about stars that was supported by a relatively new paparazzi photo trade. In the last third of the 20th century a quadri-furcated celebrity magazine market had developed with an incredible number of titles devoted to celebrity coverage. First, there were the ‘industry-related’ consumer magazines such as TV Guide and TV Times for television, Rolling Stone and Spin for popular music, Premiere for film and a general celebrity magazine for all industries such as People or Who and UK-based titles such as Hello!, OK and Dolly. These magazines, with only brief sections related to scandal, were generally supportive of the celebrities and the various industries. Indeed, in this more competitive market, these kinds of magazines made direct deals with celebrities for their ‘exclusive’ and often paid-for story. Second, there was the celebrity scandal press which included The National Enquirer and The Midnight Globe but also glossier versions that emerged in the 1990s such as New Weekly. Third, there were the upmarket celebrity style magazines which were variations of Vanity Fair but included the shorter-run George which linked directly the relationship between style, politics and popular culture, Interview which was a late 1980s survivor/legacy of Warhol, and Talk. All these upmarket magazines defined fashion and novelty within a style aesthetic that defined the contemporary moment through their coverage, profile or presentation of a variation of the celebrity. And finally, the fourth part of the celebrity magazine market were women’s magazines which intersected with all of these, but nonetheless maintained a slightly different and differentiated special section both celebrating stars and intersecting their lifestyles, trials and tribulations with the melodramatic flow of everyday life.

There is little question that there are differences between these four sources of celebrity news and coverage and the way that it has been reported in more traditional news sources. It is also true that the pandemic coverage of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes detailed above has had precedents throughout the 20th century in terms of news coverage and the uses made of celebrity. Where celebrity might have been primarily in the back pages of newspapers and the end of broadcast news reports, over time it has become increasingly normal to see celebrity news foregrounded in these forms. A critical watershed in the new fluidity of the location of celebrity news developed in the coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. As Grochowski details, crime news, which has always been a stalwart of the front sections of newspapers and top stories in broadcast media, was dealt with quite differently possibly because the main character – O.J. Simpson – was a very famous sports (American football) star who in his post-sporting career became a recognised actor and sports commentator (2002). Grochowski refers to two articles, one from the New Yorker magazine and another from the New York Times (NYT), both of which identified the usually disreputable and sensational tabloid the National Enquirer as critically significant in understanding the entire case. The National Enquirer was seen by NYT’s Margolick as ‘the bible of the case’ with the most thorough and fact-checking procedures that were overlooked by many in the mainstream media (Margolick, 1994: A12). Butler, in the New Yorker, advanced the case that the National Enquirer privileged a victim and a new feminism perspective unseen in the rest of the media and actually helped shift wider media opinion and public opinion in terms of the public perception of O.J. Simpson (Grochowski, 2002). Via the O.J. Simpson case, traditional boundaries of coverage actually break down, where quality and the sensational become much more mobile in their location. Celebrity in the news becomes something that is both normal to identify and a way to focus on a different constellation of issues and concerns. Partly because they started ‘covering’ Simpson’s abuse of his wife from five years before the trial and were able to identify continuities and patterns unseen in the other reporting, the National Enquirer coverage allowed for an investigation of the ‘personal’ as a new politics of the public sphere.

What can be seen in this expansion of celebrity news is that the original four sources of celebrity new stories can no longer be seen as the only location for their ‘type’ or style of celebrity coverage. Television, both in news reportage and in the proliferation of entertainment news via cable and subscription news services, has both regularised and normalised celebrity coverage. Newspapers, from the most traditional and authoritative such as the New York Times to the most tabloid such as the Sun play in the world of celebrity news. In a very real sense, this is an expansion and normalisation of the legitimate territory of the public sphere to include the private and the intimate of our most visible public figures.

Why did celebrity discourse expand? Emotion, sentiment and individualisation

The expansiveness of this celebrity discourse is related to a number of social and cultural movements of the 20th century. Eva Illouz’s analysis has revealed that there was an investment in what could be seen as feminine discourses of sentiment and emotion in the self-help and therapy movements between the wars. Linked to this new focus on the self and emotional therapy was Freud’s psychoanalysis and psychotherapy which became as popular in entertainment as in the western middle class (Illouz, 2007: 5–9). There was also focused psychology-inspired work by George Elton Mayo in the 1930s (the Hawthorne studies) that developed invocations to connect workers relationally and in an empowering way to their company and spawned the institutionalisation of Human Resources Management departments in larger companies and corporations (Illouz, 2007: 12–17). In general, what could be described as emotional therapies moved through the various structures of capitalism and thereby became generalised in western culture. From the 1970s onwards self-help books were legion and self-therapy was the central transformative focus of American talk shows from Phil Donahue to Dr Phil. The significance of relationships and their sentiments can be seen in the development of consumer capitalism throughout the 20th century via the privileged representational discourse of advertising. Advertising in all its forms used sentimentally inflected messages to convince various demographics of the value of goods for better relations and better lives.

Celebrity, as a discursive formation that grew in this environment, played in this same realm of communicating emotions, sentimentality and sensitivity to what was perceived to be a large female mass market via mass market magazines in particular. Of equal significance and perhaps more pervasively, the discourse of celebrity manifested through these forms of journalistic storymaking was actually supportive of a wider appreciation of individualism and individualisation. Expressing individuality became not only a dominant and clearly contradictory trope of advertising (in its bid to congeal large bands of consumers for products while maintaining the individuality of one’s expression through commodities), it became elemental to the serialised and customised forms of production in the late 20th century (see Harvey, 1989: 170–197). There are all sorts of examples that identify the individualisation of consumption as an expression of the self: from hair care products to the variety of breakfast cereals; from the customisation of cars to the serialised construction – with slight variations in style – of the suburban home; from the amazing variety of mobile phones further differentiated by covers and add-ons in the 1990s and early 2000s to the differentiated toothbrush and its variation of design in battery-powered structures; from the expansion of ‘expression’ and ‘desire’ as represented by the expansion of television channels to the differentiation of use of television from video games to personal home video. Playing in this world of personalisation and individualisation was a representational media system that worked to provide exemplars of individuals. Films and television in their fictional forms produced forms of impersonation. Television presenters and hosts produced outlines of authentic selves (Bonner, 2011). But it was the burgeoning discourse of celebrity – the extra-textual dimension of the celebrated and the famed – that was the location for the production of the idiosyncrasies of public individuals that was much more systematic in maintaining and supporting individuality in contemporary culture’s organisation.

Celebrity as a discourse has arrived in many guises and has expanded and bled through our culture as an expression of individuality in a variety of ways. Our online culture with its TMZ, E! and Perez Hilton celebrity sites along with indirect loci of fame such as YouTube has presented a different speed and calibration of fame. Celebrity has also bled into our interpretation of politics via a more intense revelatory news discourse on the intimacy of political scandals and their play of public and private. News reportage about royalty similarly has moved from its public representativeness to a kind of tabloid celebrity or uber soap opera discourse which has been further exemplified by the recent Las Vegas escapades of Prince Harry (The Sun, 2012). Similarly, the notorious – serial killers and criminals – have become celebrified as the sensational reportage from their trials continually underlines. Celebrity as a discourse moves through and shapes into media form a variety of types of news and reforms them into expressions of hyperindividuality.

Three key frameworks

This pervasiveness of celebrity identifies its quite significant status in contemporary culture. There is no question that celebrity culture operates as an explanatory tool – albeit a very elaborate instrument – for contemporary culture. What is it trying to explain? And how does it explain this?

Celebrity culture is linked to individualisation. It is also linked to personalisation and working out the dimensions of the personal in political and cultural concerns. Celebrity in and of itself is fascinating because of the way it can describe significance and value in contemporary culture; however, it is now useful to go beyond celebrity culture and see where it points indexically to long-term trends and developments that are at play more pervasively in our culture. In our study of celebrity’s origins linked to the value of sentiment and emotion in the 20th century and its further connection to individualised consumption in contemporary culture, we identified its power to engage with audiences. This sheer power of celebrity to engage has served to generate the massive amount of journalistic story writing devoted to celebrity. Taking this power further is to understand how the ur-text of celebrity culture can be defined as the critical interplay between the public and the private articulated through the individual. What needs to be investigated is how this representative system of celebrity has now become something of a model and an explanatory means for understanding a much more pervasive display of individuality in contemporary culture. It is time to investigate the way that these ways of being – the public/private/intimate of celebrity discourse – have moved through our culture quite dramatically beyond a system of representative individuals to an expansive new presentation of the self.

To get us to this new plateau of understanding how personalisation, individuality, and the move from the private to the public are now part of the wider populace rather than just at play in the representational field of celebrity culture, there are three frameworks that have to be understood: the transformation of contemporary labour and employment; the impact of social networking’s reorganisation of society; and the theoretical frame of affect and affect clusters to work out the relationship between the individual and the collective in contemporary culture. These three frames are avenues for us to understand these new dimensions of public-personalisation of our culture.

Labour

There are foundational changes in the labour market. With the exception of a few national economies, there has been a decline in unions. Australia, once thought of as the worker’s paradise for reasons that go beyond unions and may be linked to lifestyle, beaches and elaborate labour laws of employment, is now a country where substantially less than one-fifth of their workforce is unionised (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012). This is not an exception and describes international trends in the organisation of labour. The link between this longitudinal trend – a trend that has been growing for 20 to 30 years – and celebrity culture may appear to be oblique. What has to be understood is that there is a shift in how we imagine our relationship to work. Contract work has had a concomitant increase. This imagination of work is critical to the flows of our culture. However much we might want to agree or disagree with Richard Florida’s writings on the creative class and the associated megacities (see Florida, 2002, 2007, 2009), the transformation of the labour economy into service, administration, and various aspects of the knowledge economy, has led to the proliferation of individuals contracting their labour for specific projects that have very specific time lines. There have been large-scale migrations of workforces and new labour economies of service in different parts of the world and we can think of Bangalore in India (but there are many others) as perhaps the example par excellence of these changes in the location of types of work.

This disconnection of work in the 21st century from collective organisations means that greater portions of the culture are engaged in regular – probably frequent – selling of themselves. What is emerging – and it is emerging in the trades, in the professions and in service work – is that individuals are building their profiles through portfolios and their work identities through the circulation of curricula vitae in many forms and variations. A portfolio or project-based labour economy (Marsden, 2004) has been very much part of the arts for generations where one presented oneself in all sorts of ways. For example, for the actor – as much as there was the hint of an Actor’s guild or union, it was also a structure of work that demanded a glossy image and a summary of the principal roles and appearances to land new positions. A whole management and agency industry grew around this portfolio culture to help actors, directors, writers and producers engage in new employment projects.

There is a widening of the reach of contract and portfolio work culture, which is becoming closer to the idea – the imagined centre – of how we construct a work identity. To capture this differing identity which operates in contemporary culture and its increasingly widespread publicising of the self, I am deploying the related term or idea of persona. A work persona in this instance is designed to circulate publicly in some way; it is designed to brand the person so that others who control capital will find their portfolio the exact element they need to add to their company. Hearn’s work on the branded self parallels this wider phenomenon: although Hearn predominantly has investigated how reality television brands the self for work, her thesis explicitly develops that this is a wider phenomenon in contemporary consumer capitalism (2008). We can extend this idea of the work persona to understand how games companies operate in fabricating their online and video games. Workers are chosen specifically for the job and very few are kept on permanent hire. This necessitates a high public knowledge in the industry of individual work personas and the agile company pieces these workers together over a two-year game development process via short-term and project-based contracts. When the game is completed, the roster of workers shifts dramatically so that it can reconfigure around a new project with a new constellation of internationally ‘known’ workers to assemble its quite diverse elements (see Gill, 2010). Different terms have emerged to describe this changed work force, particularly in the knowledge economy: the new cybertariat (Huws, 2003), digital natives, the digirati, or perhaps generation Z where a large workforce is now comfortable with this formation of a work persona. Because this public identity formation is related to work it is a massively powerful motorforce for the presentation of the self to the public. This presentation of the self via online portfolios and other forms of making one’s self known identifies one of the core reasons for the development of persona studies to make sense of these transformations.

Social network reorganisation of society

Beyond the work frame but connected to its new publicness is another frame which allows the public world to insinuate itself into everyday individuated lives and identifies another siren call for the development of persona studies. This framework can be understood as how social networks are reorganising contemporary society. One could make the claim that social networks have been at the heart of the organisation of culture since time immemorial and that what is occurring now is nothing new – it is just channelled differently. However, I think this is underestimating the socio-cultural transformation that we are experiencing through the way technologies have allowed for a different expression, engagement and interchange via the online and mobile social media.

To understand this transformation and its implications for comprehending the proliferation of the public self, we need to add some terminology. What I have developed in my recent writing and thinking is that we are moving from a representational media and cultural regime to a presentational media and cultural regime (Marshall, 2006: 636–644, 2010a: 38–40, 2010b: 502). Representational media, which encompasses books, newspapers, magazines, film, radio and television, has been the dominant form of media for at least the last two centuries. It is representational in the sense that, through its stories, narratives, and images, these media forms attempt to embody a populace. The stories, in all their manifestations, represent a culture. Closely connected and twinned with representational media have been political and cultural systems that also represent and thereby embody others in a collective sense in a polity. There is a great deal more that could be said about representational media and certainly one manifestation of representational media is our elaborate celebrity system of personalities who are allowed to speak on our behalf. For our purposes here it is important to understand that this system of representational media is in decline. It is not being replaced, but rather it is being supplanted so that representational media is thought of in quite different ways.

What is supplanting representational media – and I want to again reiterate that this supplanting is by no means complete and overwhelming – is presentational media. Presentational media, by its name, is identifying media that is performed, produced and exhibited by the individual or other collectives and not by the structure of representational media which is almost by definition large public and private media corporations. Presentational media is supported by the generations of applications online for producing and making content relevant for the expression of the self to others. Although predating what has been called Web 2.0 and social network applications with websites, online video and images, the proliferation of presentational media has been twinned with the development of social network sites and the quite remarkable embrace of these kinds of applications over the last 10 years. Presentational media is also involved in the redirection of traditional media content so that it is blended with interpersonal chats, other images and a panoply of other kinds of content as it is shared across personal networks. In other words, the presentational form of address surrounds and situates a great deal of media and communication content: for example, the sharing of music from one friend to another, or passing the link of an amusing videoclip via YouTube acknowledge that an individual is involved in the distribution of highly produced forms. It is mediated by the personal and presented therefore in a different frame than traditional media forms of representation.

Presentational media identifies how the self is situated in contemporary media transactions quite differently from the audience in representational media structures. Because of the intersection of representational media forms and presentational media structures via social networks what is emerging is intercommunication. Intercommunication is an elaborate layering of types and forms of communication that are filtered and directed and engaged with by particular individuals in the most interpersonal way (Marshall, 2010: 41, 2011). There are many examples of this blending of the interpersonal and the highly mediated in contemporary online culture and I detail a few here via celebrities themselves. Although now somewhat historical, it is worth identifying the work of Ashton Kutcher in both developing social networks and in embodying the blend between the representational and presentational. Kutcher, who gained fame as one of the stars of That Seventies Show and subsequently in a series of romantic comedy films (currently [2013] he is starring in the situation comedy television series 2 and a Half Men), competed successfully in 2009 in beating CNN in having more than one million followers on Twitter. Kutcher has been a classic case of intercommunication: his tweets were often about the most – apparently – intimate details of his life (see Petersen, 2009) and yet his predating fame made him move in the circles of the highest level of representational media. Even more interesting is how Kutcher has been complicit in thinking through how the new forms of social media change the balances of power and connection to a wider group of players (see his foreword in Solis, 2010). Snoop Dog similarly blends his various versions of his online self, but ensures that there is a related connection to highly mediated productions such as his involvement in the film Reincarnated and its screening at the Toronto International Film Festival as well as a recent videoclip (see Snoop Dogg, 2012a, 2012b). Massive entertainment celebrities such as Justin Bieber originally depended on the viral movement of their internet content on YouTube to more powerful members of the music industry for his catapulting to fame and entering the pantheon of representational culture (Bieber, 2008; Saenz, 2010). Although I have chosen celebrities to identify this flow of representational and presentational media for their accessibility and explanatory power, it is a truism that many millions of people are constructing similar intercommunicative selves through their social networks, their linked videos, their posting of photos and other images, and their comments and conversations with others. What is emerging from this move to intercommunication and presentational media forms is a series of smaller publics or what I call ‘micropublics’ that are produced and serviced by individuals presenting their media and communication online. I return in greater detail to this concept of micropublics and how they operate below.

Affect and affect clusters

The third and final framework for seeing the need to develop something that is mapping this movement of public individuality further is a theoretical frame. What I am proposing here is a way to understand the movement between the individual and the collective in this shifted contemporary culture. From celebrity studies, there have been efforts to understand the connection between the celebrity and the audience. In my earlier writing I used the phrase ‘affective power’ which I defined as the capacity of celebrities to embody emotional investment in some way. Their capacity to produce audiences for exchange defined their power in the entertainment industry and the wider culture (Marshall, 1997: 54–55). A simple example became apparent when I was interviewing Jane Nicolls, deputy editor of one of the major Australian magazines Who Weekly (which is a sister publication of People) in the late 1990s for the book Fame Games (Turner et al., 2000: 138). Nicolls indicated forthrightly that having Leonardo DiCaprio on a cover increased the magazine rack sales by tens of thousands (2000: 138). There was an affective connection that Leonardo at that time had with a female youth audience and it played heavily into the temporary bump in sales. What is at the heart of celebrity culture and now lives in the heart of a wider persona culture is affect. To a degree, some of this relationship to affect has been explored by Sean Redmond’s work on the play of emotion in public personalities via confession, but it has not been explicitly referred to as such (2011). Similarly, Henry Jenkins’ quite remarkable body of work on fan culture is particularly resonant in describing the attribution of intense emotional connections to specific cultural artefacts of small groups (2012[1992]). He has taken this work further into his studies of convergence culture, which relies heavily on his reading of engagement and what I would call affective attachment in fan culture behaviour (Jenkins, 2008). Like Redmond, Jenkins’ work is invaluable in studying the way that the dispersed but clustered affect world of online culture operates.

The concept of affect is drawn from two particular traditions that occasionally intersect and help provide a theoretical frame for understanding contemporary persona and its play in a public world. From psychology, Sylvan Tomkins’ work has helped lay the foundations of the cultural studies’ turn to affect as a way to understand the flows of contemporary culture (via Sedgwick and Frank, 1995; Tomkins, 1995). The other tradition could be said to derive from Deleuzian thinking via Brian Massumi, where affect is used to provide a reintegration of biological thinking around the body itself into the humanities, as well as challenge the claims of comprehension in fields such as neuroscience through the use of scientific metaphors: affect is both pre-rational and a moment in the organisation of self and relationship to other(s) (2002). Traversing similar Deleuzian understandings of affect and using it to make sense of popular music, the cultural studies theorist Lawrence Grossberg identified a strategic battleground in affect and emotional connection and the politics of American right and left. Grossberg’s concept of an ‘affective economy’ (1987: 175–197), where emotion is attributed and in a sense rationalised, captures the way that public individuals congeal not only attention but clusters of support not dissimilar to the way that social media use attracts friends and followers for individuals. What we usefully gain from this tradition is that there are connections in our culture that are not necessarily coordinated with purposive and rational alignments. They are organised around clusters of sentiment that help situate people on various spectra of activity and engagement. From Tomkins, we can understand that affect can produce emotional memories that are unconscious or unexplored until one is faced with a parallel experience. Moreover, affect can move through populations as it attaches to other retained but unconscious emotional memories and thus can exhibit patterns of contagion, magnification and amplification. The best way that I can summarise the value of affect is to quote Gibbs, who has mapped its connection to the humanities: ‘affect organizes, both intra- and inter-corporeally, and is crucial to social responsiveness’ (2002: 337). Affect allows us to understand the movement between the self and the social, which is the critical ground that persona studies endeavours to uncover.

In combining affect theory with making sense of how social networking is reorganising society, one can begin to see that the various micropublics social network culture produces are in effect affect clusters. The intercommunication industry (companies such as Facebook, Myspace, Google generally, through YouTube and Twitter and many other sites that are also producing an environment for social interaction and the applications which permit media forms to be blended with interpersonal communication) is effectively working to produce affect clusters and then charting how these clusters cohere. They then organise and sell those forms of clustering on to advertisers and other information miners for other purposes of connection. The terminology used by social networkers in setting up these associations is interesting in terms of their weak but implied emotional bonds or forms of affective association – on Facebook one’s relationship with others is labelled ‘friends’. Although not always dealt with the implied emotional intensity that might be engendered in primary school, we are asked to respond to friend requests. And in other instances, we can defriend, or ignore or banish friend requests. On Twitter, we are similarly asked to be ‘followers’ and we indicate who we are following. In social network structures, we are told to observe the intersection of friends and to determine whether a new friend request should be made to someone who is or could be a mutual friend. In other words, if you are connected to someone, there is a probability that you will like and be friends with someone they are connected with.

If affect is the explanatory tool to understand the flow of connections and the patterns of organisation in contemporary culture, it must be more than accentuated that the core of this nerve pattern of social networks that produce affective clusters is the online self. Constructing the self and building the power of the self is connected to this affective economy whose groundwork has been organised by the intercommunication industry. The individual – through interpersonal forms of communication, through connecting through games, and through the exchange of images and mediated forms – is constituting a persona, where there is a continuous interplay between the self and a micropublic.

The proliferation of the public self

From this vantage point of a transformed labour economy, a shifted and reorganised society partially reconfigured through the expansiveness of social networks, and of understanding how affect clusters are part of the online industry and embedded in the organisation of the online self, we can see that there is not only affect but massive collective desire to become part of this new social construction of identity and public display. The examples of the expansion of the public self through our culture are legion. They identify how ideas migrate through individuals, personas are created and how these personas are exchanged and sometimes transformed in terms of their meanings by the affect clusters that have congealed around their identity.

Generalising the presentation of the public self: Developing micropublics and its interconnections

There are thousands of powerful examples which can highlight the way that information about the self migrates through online culture and occasionally produces moments of real fame for participants as cultural memes. Like a viral video that intersects with news discourses, information and identity formation are moving differently and through layers of media and communication. Foundational in this new movement of identity and information is the interpersonal constitution of identity embedded in very powerful online interconnected social networks. These networks are born with different intentions, affordances and functionality. Their designs only partially identify how they have been deployed; their users have often transmogrified those designs towards new purposes and objectives.

First via blogs and websites and now via social network sites, the central online innovation is not so much the development of new massive publics, but more the development of what I am calling ‘micropublics’. Thus, there is no question that one’s persona is not necessarily dependent on millions or billions of people being aware of your existence. Micropublics identify a newer duality: these are the followers and friends that are connected to a range of content via a particular individual that is simultaneously a ‘private’ network, but regularly and publicly updated and responded to in the tradition of broadcast and print media forms that makes it a quasi-public network. To understand the new public persona one has to begin looking closely at these developed and developing micropublics that are emerging around individuals. Artists of one sort or another have been the first to play in this space. Thus you will see the success of Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker, at engaging in what he sees as relevant debates and moments of outrage that match his pre-existing public persona (2012); or the polymath, Stephen Fry, identifying via Twitter his unfathomable range of interests and directions (2012). Much as Ashton Kutcher has successfully achieved, the new social networking services such as Facebook are used by artists and journalists alike to amass public followings and to ‘service’ and build the affective connection to their listeners/viewers/readers. Those listeners/viewers/readers are flattered into becoming members as followers and friends (a weak affective bond that implies greater connection and hence its flattery to the fan) and thus become privy to and affectively connected to the interpersonal ramblings of these artists, which may reveal something about their music, their books, their films, their appearances and their intentions. What I have described as the intercommunication industry services these micropublics, whether those that are massively large as achieved by popular artists or those that are set up by smaller players whose desires of presenting a public self and maintaining a following are much more modest. The intercommunication industry is populated with massive forms of social media – such as Twitter with its 170 million regular users (Fitzsimmons, 2012) and Facebook with 800 million plus users (Internet World Stats, 2012) – that connect friends and followers into linked networks that produce micropublics that have the capacity to connect to millions. Professional social media sites – such as LinkedIn and Academia.edu – present ways in which particularised networks form and micropublics emerge related to specific skills, interests or themes. Public personas emerge as much via these presentational media forms and their micropublics where the management of reputation (Barbour and Marshall, 2012) moves to centre stage in contemporary culture and its online doppelganger.

Conclusion: Persona studies manifesto

What I have mapped in this article is a complicated chart that is designed to point to a conclusion of needed work and research. I have detailed how journalistic practice has been one of the instruments in the expansion of celebrity culture. Via that kind of exposure of the public and the private and through the various extensions in its value to news and the commodity of news, I have identified how the discourse of celebrity has been normalised, generalised and extended in contemporary culture. Indeed, journalistic practice in and of itself has been on a similar trajectory of emphasising the individual in its production of stories and news, where the routine anonymity of the reporter has in itself disappeared (Marshall, 2005). Fundamentally, journalism’s involvement in this expansion of the public self is where it plays: journalism has helped produced the public sphere and has helped determine the nature of what is included and excluded in that public sphere. This article identifies an even stronger intensification on the significance of the public personality as new cultural technologies of expression, exchange and communication have developed that complement the work on the public personality that journalistic practice has nourished and benefited from its expansion. It should be added that these cultural trends were much wider than journalism: I have identified the increasing constitution of individualisation in contemporary culture from a variety of directions. I want to conclude therefore with a manifesto for an area of study that I am calling persona studies, which provides a different focus from previous strategies in media and cultural studies that have investigated the self and the individual. I consider the critical journalistic inquiry similarly demanding an investigation of this new constitution of the public and the private via a study of the formations of persona and the new forms in which the self is publicised, both through traditional media and in the intercommunication world I have outlined above in the exposure of the more generalised public self.

There are terms that have helped us understand the constitution of identity. From the long history of post-structuralism, the concept of subjectivity was useful in the way that it reconfigured our thinking about how the individual was constructed; for instance, it helped us understand how gender was a social construct of identity and therefore could be thought of discursively. What has been excluded and left relatively untheorised is the agency in the individual. It is for this reason that areas such as leadership studies have found it much more comfortable to be housed in business and management studies where relatively uncritical adoption of individual agency is more readily accepted than in the more critically derived disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities. In contrast, the post-structural theories of the subject, perhaps best articulated by Foucault, deal in passive dimensions: when Foucault explored the very individuated concept of the author (after Barthes’ claim of the death of the author; 1974), he focused on how it was a way of organising the meaning of things as a form of authority – an ‘author-function’. Although certain authors of power were transdiscursive in their ability to determine the flow of other texts and be written about and referred to, it still was a system that produced these functions for legal objectives and for the articulation of meaning in particular disciplines of publication (Foucault, 1977: 113–138).

Studying celebrity challenged these conventions of thought around subjectivity. Celebrity, as much as it implies a social construct and industrial construct, also implies a kind of individual agency. Its relationship to fame was often patterned with a will to produce a version of the self that could be used by and through the various entertainment industries and in some cases beyond. It also has been instrumental in pointing to how connections and attachments were made to these celebrity figures by others – how interest clusters, affective clusters came to coalesce around stars and this clustering was used by various industries for various commercial ends: the formation of audiences and selling of those audiences was the principal model of the commercial media and stars and celebrities were part of that construction of audiences. One other dimension of celebrity is worth noting: there was something uncontainable about the personalities of celebrity as the extra-textual elements of celebrity – the gossip, the stories, the behind-the-scenes – produced a new industry yes, but also pointed to the leaky nature of identity in celebrity culture. Its leakiness related to the movement from the public to the private, to the intimate and then back again to the public. The leakiness also produced the discursive bleeding of celebrity into wider and wider aspects of contemporary life.

Persona studies, I want to claim, allows us to look at these contradictions of construction and agency throughout the culture and to see how, through various forces of change and transformation which include changes in work, transformation of our forms of social connection and networking via new technologies, and consequent new affective clusters and micropublics, we are witnessing and charting a new constitution of public identity. Persona definitionally implies an outward appearance of the individual – originally a Latin word related to mask (OED Online, 2012) – that helps us understand that the push to publicise the self is endemic or perhaps pandemic in contemporary society. It has been originally used to identify the person either welcome or not welcome in terms of diplomatic or judicial settings: the persona grata or the persona non grata. It has also been regularly employed in acting – by creating a believable persona on stage, the actor had accomplished her purpose. Persona from Jungian psychoanalysis was a negotiation between the personal and the collective: ‘fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be’ (Jung, 1992: 158). It contains the individual as they form their mask of the self for the outside world (1992: 158). These ideas of the self have been expanded into studies of the performance of the self or presentation of the self in the work of Erving Goffman and his work on every day dramaturgy via symbolic interaction (1959). His mid-20th-century writing has been very influential in making sense of current internet studies and the forms of self-display online culture privileges (e.g. Robinson, 2007). Through the idea of persona, persona studies is an investigation of the presentation of the self, in an era where self-presentation has moved quite dramatically to centre stage for large expanses of the populace.

This is a call to action – to research if you like – to explore the pervasive play of persona in contemporary life. There may be all sorts of launching points for its investigation, but the peculiar study of celebrity is perhaps the best in terms of understanding this quite dramatic cultural movement to the public domain through the self. I wanted to conclude with some of the directions I am taking and would encourage others to join this investigation. It requires teams of researchers to work through the patterns of connection. It requires further theoretical work on affect as a useful concept and construct to uncover the kinds of connections and bonds that form from public self to public self and from idea generation to social movements. It requires research on how affective clusters and micropublics form through chains of public individuals/or persona. What we need to build is the matrix of persona operating in our cultures, an investigation that is as intricate and politically charged as the beginning directions in cultural studies.

We need to identify and explore individuated prestige economies and how they are constituted through persona. Here I am thinking of the art world and fringe art world (Barbour, 2012), the way that academia is structured, the way that sports constructs and promotes forms of individuality in its development of athletes, and also the way that politics works to develop affect clusters and micropublics around individuals. Further explorations can look at how lawyers hierarchise themselves, and how doctors establish value and differentiation in smaller micropublics that occasionally go international. On a more pervasive social level, we need to explore the connection between contract work and persona and how it is shaping the organisation of new generations of workers. The beginnings of this work have been developed by Andrew Ross (2003), Ursula Huws (2003) and perhaps others who have looked at the knowledge economy workforce, but much more needs to be uncovered and understood. We need to understand how prestige and persona are part of online youth culture and explore how this moves, migrates and mutates in connected micropublics that can shift where youth congregates online. We need to investigate how these changes are shifting our categories for examination. One of the most interesting areas of investigation in terms of persona is online gaming culture – currently under investigation in the work of Chris Moore (2005) – which produces another construction of prestige as one’s avatar and one’s offline self contribute to interesting forms of hybrid identities and values.

Extensions of this work are legion. Persona studies can become equally an applied approach where expertise is provided to groups in professional settings related to reputation and profile. It can also begin to look at how the constitution of our fictional narratives is shifting in an era of presentational media and persona. And it can explore the transformation of autobiography and biography. I know there are many other pressing issues and problems in this world that may seem important and are certainly deserving of our research resources; but this proliferation of the public self does effectively cross with how we move forward with many of these issues and concerns. It is essential for understanding the shifted forms of contemporary communication that I have called here intercommunication – where the interpersonal forms of communication of persona are interwoven with mediated forms to help form affective connections (micropublics) that are essential to move ideas from their affective origins into effective movements and moments in contemporary culture. Celebrity and its elaborate discourse fostered by journalism, along with an online culture that has intensified the significance of the individual profile, have spawned a clear need to investigate persona. The new dimensions of the public/private presentation of the self demand an understanding of the clearly new configuration of our transformed public world. The traditional professional home of journalism has been in representational media forms and the associated cultural regimes. In the era where persona and presentational media are rising, a new era of journalistic practice intertwined with a new public/private/intimate public sphere is already in formation.