P. David Marshall

Charles Sturt University

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...

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, pre...

This article looks at the emerging comfortability with how selling the self has become normalized transnationally. Commodifying the self has been the natural province of celebrities: they use their visibility for their own ends, but also to draw attention to particular issues that are beyond their celebrity value. These activities represent a form...

Over the last 25 years, major research in media and cultural studies has investigated the play of affect in our cultures. ‘Affect’, as a term derived from its neurophysiological and psychological origins, defines the particular movement of feeling from sensation to its attribution as an identifiable emotion. This article explores the way that ‘affe...

This article looks at what happened to Hollywood actor Amber Heard when she chose to “speak out” in the Washington Post about her experiences of domestic violence. The fallout was more than her having to defend her story in a defamation lawsuit brought by her superstar ex-husband, Johnny Depp. She incurred an intensely hostile social media backlash...

This introduction to this issue works to map how emotion is situated in contemporary digital culture. It is derived from an international online symposium led by the authors and including leading scholars in this area of study and investigation from more than 5 countries in November 2021. The article works to identify and summarise the material gen...

Highly mediated, mega-sporting events provide opportunities for elite athletes to use their prominent status to elicit social change. However, with expectations and policies in place to regulate behaviour that prevents athletes from making political statements, athlete activists face risks. An examination of the 2018 Commonwealth Games highlighted...

A great deal of recent research has dealt with the transformation of identity and presentation of the self that has developed from the wider presence, naturalization and normalization of digital culture and communication. Much of this work connects strongly to what has emerged as persona studies over the last decade; but it has to be equally acknow...

The paper presents a methodology to understand WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs) from their backend to their frontend, and from tracing the platform's history to its present. Our ‘Backend-in method’ proposes to study platform governance in the meso – between macro political economic concerns and the micro (and usually mobile) user-interface mediation...

Scholarship and academic enquiry are complex entities. Individuals sequester themselves to complete their projects, publications, and manuscripts, and this solo activity can make us collectively think that the ivory tower of academic life is real. But the real hub of research, and its genuine success, is built from the process of exchange: conversa...

Through a particular study of online entertainment reviewing, this chapter explores the emergence of a new strategic persona in contemporary culture. It investigates the way that the production of entertainment-related commentary, reviews and critiques online is increasingly defined by a complex relationship and intersection with what is described...

Graduates must learn to present a version of themselves that aligns with the expectations and norms of their discipline or profession, organisations in which they might work and the public at large; and to be able to adapt as they change careers and workplaces. Persona studies offers a lens for reimagining more authentic forms of assessment design,...

Celebrity articulates a very particular form of public identity that more or less is linked to the extensions of the self beyond one’s primary activity and into the complex dimensions of publicity, fame, and into a wider, and by its very definition, popular culture. Celebrity’s relationship to another form of public identity—the politician/politica...

Persona is a very mutable concept. Perhaps its mutability is no more prominently displayed that in its intersection and integration into music and musical culture. In this opening essay for our special issue on music and persona, we chart the meaning and the value of persona analyses to the study of music. Essentially, our objective here is two-fol...

The conferring of an honorary degree on an entertainment celebrity has become an increasingly regular and routine practice, a symptom of how readily the value and capital accumulated in entertainment industries can be converted into value in another field like academia. In this paper, we argue that the celebrity persona is a crucial factor in easin...

Through a public persona analysis of particular Australian film stars this chapter explores how their professional and fictional identities have inhabited Hollywood film and its associated culture of promotion. It interrogates how these formations of character, persona and brand are linked with the internal exigencies of contemporary Hollywood itse...

The present work interrogates Al Gore’s persona as a climate change activist with reference to a process we describe by the neologism “personification”: the act of constructing/presenting a public persona in order to cultivate impressions that enable public figures to consolidate authoritative reputations. The formation of such a commanding persona...

Academic communication, at least in its formal written form, has been built on a long and strong history of systems of validation and verification since about the seventeenth century and the development of the European (Western) Enlightenment. This paper investigates the contemporary challenges that online communication and culture has to this long...

In this introductory essay, we will use the collected work on political persona that is developed in this issue to better define political persona. But before we evaluate and identify the intersections of our contributors’ work, we want to begin our exploration with what makes political persona constitutively different today than in the past. Can w...

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 understandin...

(DEUTSCH) Der Beitrag untersucht das neue Einverständnis mit einer Kommodifizierung des Selbst, wie sie für gewöhnlich die Celebrity kennzeichnete. Celebrities können ihre Sichtbarkeit sowohl für ihre eigenen Zwecke, wie für Themen einsetzen, die außerhalb ihres eigentlichen Celebrity-Werts zu liegen scheinen. Die Art von Agency, die sie in die öff...

One of the prevailing tropes of the child stars in popular entertainment is their precociousness. This chapter develops the public/popular construction of coming of age. It looks at how popular culture constructs the movement from child to adult which begins with precocious public presentation of children with adult-like abilities to their adolesce...

It seems politics invades everything. We can rarely think of any activity, any building, any human-to-human interaction and not see some political dimension infiltrating and shaping it. And this very interpretation, in its language of invasion and infiltration, implies that politics’ ubiquity is not necessarily a wanted accomplice in our human worl...

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 it produces a...

Person and persona are presented as conceptually at opposite ends of a spectrum. Person describes the internal dimensions of the self, while persona identifies the external and public presentations of the self. The entry explores these ideas of person and public persona and their theoretical origins in media and communication research, and how they...

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 abl...

This chapter captures a changed ?structure of feeling? in contemporary culture that, according to the author, is best encapsulated through the word and concept of ?exposure?. Exposure, conceptually, is a way to express what we are collectively experiencing individual by individual and individual to individual. The chapter is divided into sections w...

Value is a very slippery concept and perhaps even more slippery when it is related to celebrity. This part is devoted to celebrity value.... A cursory look at value and celebrity presents some obvious tropes that our contributors have identified in their analyses. First of all, celebrity value is often a study of the power of celebrity....

This introduction maps the patterns of celebrity as a formation of knowledge (and power) historically: "Examining the historical dimensions that inform our current celebrity culture makes it clearer how celebrity as a discursive formation - to use a Foucauldian turn of phrase - is an incredibly active and enduring site for the debate and contestati...

This introductory essay maps the area of celebrity studies and its migration into the academy(university) in the last 30 years. Through first a study of how celebrities have been used by universities to play in the attention economy through honorary doctorates, the introduction then focuses on how the field of celebrity studies has emerged. The sec...

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 intr...

Forms of identification are central to the experience of celebrity. Through an investigation of the meaning of identification and how that translates into our para-social relations with celebrity, this essay situates the work in this area of the study of celebrity - from fan relations to the emulatory structure of identity that celebrity provides f...

Technology shapes the production of the public self. Celebrity has been positioned within the exigencies of different technological apparatuses - in film, television, online culture, and popular music - and is designed for very interesting but specific constructions of pleasure, performance and value. This essay situates the technological understru...

This essay explores the notion of value and how it has been represented and organised by celebrity culture and some of the emerging online dimensions of "influencer" culture. The introduction situates the debates and where current research on celebrity and value are positioned and contextualizes the subsequent three chapter contributions in this pa...

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 it produces a...

If the twentieth century has been dominated by discussions of the public, public life, and the public sphere, Contemporary Publics argues that, in the twenty-first century, we must complicate the singularity of that paradigm and start thinking of our world in terms of multiple, overlapping, and competing publics. In three distinct streams-art, medi...

Celebrities have often championed political causes whether it be Jane Fonda protesting against the Vietnam War or Elizabeth Taylor supporting AIDS research and victims of AIDS. Some celebrities such as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger left acting behind altogether to enter politics for real. Recently however actors such as Ben Affleck, Georg...

At its core, the power of the public intellectual is the capacity to make ideas move through a culture. This paper looks at what kind of academic persona – that is, what kind of public self whose original status comes from intellectual work and thinking – navigates effectively through online culture and communicates ideas in the contemporary moment...

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...

One of the key transformations in contemporary culture is the insistent demand to construct a public persona. Constructing a persona for navigating through life is not new; what is new is the naturalization of producing a mediatized version of this public self. The complexity of producing an online public identity involves the labour of 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 exhibi...

Through two concepts, this paper investigates how online culture is shifting our understanding of media, communication and what could be described as the public sphere. The concept of intercommunication is developed to explicate how online culture blends what has often been seen as separate domains: there is now a higher fluidity between what is se...

Research on celebrity and public persona derives from fundamentally interdisciplinary sources. Although at its core, the study of public personality has been the object of investigations by those more closely associated with media and communication, the key disciplines of sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, political science, social psyc...

Research on celebrity and public persona derives from fundamentally interdisciplinary sources. Although at its core, the study of public personality has been the object of investigations by those more closely associated with media and communication, the key disciplines of sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, political science, social psyc...

Understanding the complexity with which celebrity has been imbricated in cultures over time requires observing it as an elaborate discourse that shapes knowledge and power. This essay situates this section of the book in terms of the themes of history and significance of celebrity.

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 publi...

Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, celebrities represent not only the embodiment of success but also the ultimate construction of false value. Celebrity and Power questions the impulse to become embroiled with the construction and collapse of the famous, exploring the concept of the new public intimacy: a product of social media in which cel...

The emergence of the cinema star, according to Richard DeCordova, is intimately linked with the decline of the allure of the apparatus of motion picture projection. Until about 1907, the focus of attention was on the technical feat of displaying images and stories on the screen. Most of early cinema was documentary in nature, with aspects of everyd...

In many ways, researching persona is a study in the production, dissemination, and exchange of the singularity (Heinich 1996) of public identity. One starting point is to look at the production of the presentation of the self, which allows for a particularly valuable way of studying celebrity and public personalities. This paper move from this poin...

Persona is a public presentation of identity. One of the key values of a persona is its consistency in its presentation of the self. This article is designed to be the first exploratory steps and overview in charting the idea of seriality in relation to persona and its utility as a concept to describe the constancy and transformation of identity th...

Sometimes a particular concept—a simple term—is the spark to a series of ideas. It might be ostentatious and perhaps hubristic that the editors of an issue on persona might imagine that their choice of the term persona has provided this intellectual spark. Fully aware of that risk, we want to announce that it has. The response to the call for paper...

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...

Netflix's success has been a phenomenon in the United States and where it has migrated as a source for the distribution of film and television content in recent years. Now producing and distributing original series such as House of Cards and Arrested Development, Netflix is building a successful model that could move into the australian market in f...

As much as the contemporary talent show appears to be different, there are qualities that relate to earlier versions of televised talent contests internationally and domestically. This article explores how the past iterations inform the present and its production of an internal - almost studio system - of fame.

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 expl...

Academics operate semi-autonomously: On one level they are believed to be independent experts in their field of study and both impart their knowledge to students and to other academics. On another level, they are employees in an elaborate system of higher education where the expectations are constantly there to connect to university strategic plans...

PromotionReplicationIncomeAlliancesReplacementConclusion References

There is an expansion of celebrity culture outward. Through new media forms, greater portions of the populace are now constucting online public personas. The best way to understand this proliferation of the public presentation of the self is through the term specular, a two-way mirror of projection on to the screen and the circulation of and intera...

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...

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...

This chapter focuses on the television-like industries and viewing practices that have emerged on other screens. Through a discussion of the internet and mobile media, it explores the developing relationships between the existing television industry, the constellation of new media industries that have integrated video, and the new audiences generat...

Our single-word issue title “publish” no doubt conjures up all sorts of anxieties in most writers and academics. It first rings through the head as a command to produce, to make, to compose—and underlines its necessity. Publish implies an invocation of engagement with its sister noun “public.” It also suggests an interchange and exchange between an...

Our single-word issue title “publish” no doubt conjures up all sorts of anxieties in most writers and academics. It first rings through the head as a command to produce, to make, to compose—and underlines its necessity. Publish implies an invocation of engagement with its sister noun “public.” It also suggests an interchange and exchange between an...

From the new celebrity culture that has emerged from reality television and the Internet, to the paparazzi-filled endgame of Princess Diana and the bizarre trials and tribulations of Michael Jackson, The Celebrity Culture Reader documents the significant role that celebrities occupy in contemporary culture. Combining classic essays and contemporary...