P. David Marshall

The promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as marker of presentational media

This article explores how the celebrity discourse of the self both presages and works as a pedagogical tool for the burgeoning world of presentational media and its users that is now an elemental part of new media culture. What is often understood as social media via social network sites is also a form of presentation of the self and produces this new hybrid among the personal, interpersonal and the mediated – what I am calling ‘presentational media’. Via Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and Twitter individuals engage in an expression of the self that, like the celebrity discourse of the self, is not entirely interpersonal in nature nor is it entirely highly mediated or representational. This middle ground of self-expression – again partially mediated and partially interpersonal (and theoretically drawing from Erving Goffmans work) – has produced an expansion of the intertextual zone that has been the bedrock of the celebrity industry for more than half a century and now is the very centre of the social media networks of the internet and mobile media. The article investigates this convergence of presentation of the self through a study of social network patterns of presentation of celebrities and the very overcoded similarity in the patterns of self-presentation of millions of users. It relates these forms of presentation to the longer discourse of the self that informed the production of celebrity for most of the last century.

Persona studies: Mapping the proliferation of the public self:

Celebrity has developed into a particularly powerful and pervasive trope for contemporary culture. It works at organising what we perceive as significant and this is made evident through its permeation of what constitutes news. Similarly, celebrity has been well documented in terms of its capacity to shape our entertainment: stardom is at least one of the cultural economies in which our stories and fictions are selected or read and recreated in popular culture. This article argues for the development of persona studies, where research on the celebrity is a subset of a wider study of how the self and public intersect and produce versions and identities that in some way continue to support the wider demands of our work economies.

Mediating the Olympics

The Olympics have long been an incredibly elaborate media spectacle. This article explores, through the 2008 Beijing Games, the transformation of the Olympic spectacle as new media forms become more regular partners in its production, distribution and exhibition, as well as producing other forms of interpersonal mediation that are part of what can be called new media communication. Because of the Olympics’ close association with broadcasting — and, over the last 50 years, specifically television — this article will argue that looking at the new forms of delivery of the Olympics identifies the power-shifts at play between older media and new media as industries.

Persona as method: exploring celebrity and the public self through persona studies

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.

Introduction: The Plurality of Publics

The singularity of the concepts of public and public sphere is explored in this essay and ultimately challenged. Through an investigation of the deployment of the term public, a determination of the relationship of the private to the public, and a study of the emergence and value of the term “publics,” the book’s sections and contributions are introduced.

Personifying agency: The public–persona–place–issue continuum

What is fascinating about the articles in this issue is the sheer reach of celebrity culture and the capacity of researchers to begin to see how this conceptualisation of public identity is a peculiar form of power. There is an interesting blend of issues around agency contained in these pieces that are ostensibly about celebrity ecologies. Of course, celebrity ecology can be thought of from a number of perspectives, which the issue editors highlight. Using the term ‘ecology’ for me is about recognising an elaborate discursive system in operation that has properties that overlay other structures and systems. Celebrity ecology in its singular form provides a quite different constitution of an ecosystem that plays in our contemporary world in hierarchising not only the power of individuals, but just as equally, the issues that are explored through these individuals. It is probably worth reminding writers dancing in this world of ecology that readers of McLuhan – and in particular Neil Postman and a variety of successors – have tried to shape an intellectual movement over the last 30 years by exploring the idea of a media ecology as a way to differentiate mediated worlds from real worlds (and the approach – it must be said – was only moderately successful) (Gronbeck 2007, Lum 2006). What is advanced in this issue is a dual, and perhaps duelling, use of the term: the ecology of celebrity is afforded entry into the privileged discourses of the media and is therefore an element of a media ecology; and ecology of celebrity identifies an ethical and normative posture that allows the exploration of an issue (ecology itself) via the public persona. The works in this issue represent a challenge to how we might understand the power and reach of celebrity. For instance, Pramod Nayar’s (2013) layered reading of the River Narmada as a celebrity challenges us to come with new terminology to describe a form of anthropomorphism that is massaged and moulded through celebritised carriers of a cause back and forth into a wider media system. When juxtaposed with Blewitt’s very sophisticated reading of the historical deployment of animal celebrity, where the celebrity status is a concept/media form removed from agency, we begin to see that celebrity is a construct – a vehicle for the movement of ideas (Blewitt 2013). This use of celebrity is clearly personifying the structure of issues and their translation to provide emotive touchpoints for how we might read a particular issue in the public world. Celebrity becomes the conduit of affective power and its mutability allows for many issues to be considered.

The celebrity persona pandemic

The Celebrity Persona Pandemic explores how the construction of a public persona is fetishized in contemporary culture. As social media has progressively led to a greater focus on the production of the self, so this book looks at the most visible versions of persona through figures such as Stephen Colbert, Cate Blachett, and Justin Bieber, as well as fictional characters like Spock and Harry Potter. Ultimately, P. David Marshall closely studies how persona culture shapes our notions of value and significance, and dramatically shifts cultural politics.

When the private becomes public: commodity activism, endorsement, and making meaning in a privatised world

The divide between the public realm and the private realm is a both a moveable and permeable boundary. One of the reasons for this fluidity as to what constitutes these two realms is driven by different political postures. From a neoliberal position, the private—be that private industry, the individual self, the engines of the economy—is better able to produce the Benthamite characterisation of happiness for the greatest number. In contrast, from a socialist to social democratic position, an expanded public disbursement of commonwealth is seen to produce a more equitable, just, and ultimately happy society. Somewhere between these two extremes is a regulated marketplace which more or less describes the organisation of most Western polities.

Situating Public Intellectuals

The concept of the public intellectual has always been a somewhat contested term. This article serves as both an introduction to the debates around what it constitutes and an entry point into how the new media environment is producing a different configuration of the public intellectual. Through key thinkers who have addressed the idea of the public intellectual internationally and those who have focused on the Australian context, this essay positions the arguments made by the authors in this special issue. Via a short case-study of TED, the conference and online idea-spreading phenomenon, it argues that the contemporary moment is producing and privileging a different constellation of experts as celebrities that match the exigencies of online attention economy. A shifted conception of the public intellectual is beginning to take shape that is differently constituted, used and situated, and this article helps to define the parameters for further discussion of these transformations.

Productive consumption: agency, appropriation and value in the creative consuming of David Bowie

Abstract Productive consumption has been used in economic literature to describe the movement of value to activity that occurs after what we would normally think of as consumption. This essay argues that productive consumption is a useful way to describe the movement of cultural commodities and their proliferation of value beyond consumption by understanding any cultural form is dependent on a co-creation of value by both the artist and the artist’s audience/consumers. In the circuit of cultural products, there is something generated that creatively transforms the product in the audience and generates at minimum new structures of value. This article explores the concept of productive consumption in terms of Bowie and his general awareness of this co-creation of value. It identifies the production of value inherent in the consumption process of Bowie through two examples: through Tribute Bands and the way that working performers retool Bowie and his music for a lived experience for a core memorializing Bowie audience; and through the performative persona of Bowie and its play with artifice as opposed to authenticity that became the source for all sorts of performance personas in popular music for more than 40 years.