When I tell people I am doing my PhD, this question naturally follows: “what are you doing your PhD on?”.
Every time I hear the question, I try to assemble my thoughts and come up with the perfect elevator pitch. I usually say, “I’m looking at non-human persona”. And this is generally met with a puzzled look and a second dreaded question: “what’s a persona?”. Summarising persona in one sentence is tough, so I typically say, “it looks at how we present a public version of ourselves”. And after receiving another confused look, I usually follow up with, “you know how you use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and maybe Tik Tok to post things online? And, you present a slightly different version of yourself on each of these platforms? I’m looking at that, but how non-human things also do this”. And then, I get a nod of recognition. Eureka!
Because persona is complex, I thought I’d spend this week’s blog explaining what it is, where it came from, and why it’s important to study it.
What is persona?
Persona refers to how we construct a public version of ourselves, whether this be celebrities, influencers, everyday individuals or non-human entities and objects. The concept of ‘persona’ is an outcome of recognising a shift in how we find, experience and share media; due to the disruption of digital technologies like the internet and social media. In a networked era, we find ourselves in a ‘presentational’ paradigm, where media is “performed, produced and exhibited by the individual as part of the presentation of the public self” (Moore 2019). For example, when users post perfectly unpolished ‘photo dumps’ on Instagram, or wait until something eventful happens to post a late BeReal, they are media in presentational ways. This practice of using social media to create a public self is what we describe as an online persona.
I recommend Dr Christopher Moore’s video lecture on the topic for more information on the paradigm shift surrounding persona.
Due to the ubiquity of digital technologies like smartphones and social media platforms, constructing online personas has become an everyday practice. Marshall, Moore and Barbour (2020) refer to this as the ‘mediatisation’ of our lives – the way we experience daily life through various media forms, whether this be scrolling through social media, streaming our favourite TV shows or relying on our smart devices for our everyday activities. We now spend significant time interacting on social networking platforms, where we present several differing ‘selves’ across platforms. A user might post a curated photo dump of personal images on Instagram, career updates on their LinkedIn, political opinions on Twitter, life updates on Facebook, and nothing at all on Tik Tok – because they don’t post, they scroll. Across these platforms, a complex, multifaceted picture is painted of the user, which, when combined, forms their online persona.
Accordingly, some scholars consider persona as a public-facing role performed by an individual that varies according to social settings and is distinct from their ‘true’ (or private) self (Chandler & Munday 2020; Goffman 1959; Jung 1983; Marshall et al. 2020). However, media and communication scholars consider persona as an ‘assemblage’ – an outward collection of performances of self across numerous instances, situations and platforms, rather than a representation of inner consciousness. Therefore, we can apply this same thinking equally to human and non-human entities that produce public ‘selves’.
The increasing presence of non-human personas on social media, or ‘virtual’ personas, invites consideration of how these personas work. Do non-human personas align with traditional ideas of the ‘self’? Or do they represent something else entirely? This curiosity led me to my research.
Where did persona come from?
Persona is a concept derived from the ancient Greek theatrical practice of wearing ‘prosopon’ masks to portray characters. Similarly, the term was used in Ancient Rome to describe the mask of performance, explaining the historical connection between the term ‘persona’ and ideas of a public performance.
The concept of persona has been used in psychology, literature, performing arts and understanding celebrities. All of which developed into a body of literature spearheaded by David Marshall, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour (see: Barbour 2014; Barbour et al. 2017; Marshall 2015, 2014; Marshall & Barbour 2015; Marshall et al. 2015; Moore & Barbour 2016; Moore et al. 2017). Their book, Persona Studies: An Introduction (2020) consolidates a breadth of research available in the Persona Studies journal (see: Boucaut 2021; Giles 2020; Holland 2021; Humphrey 2017; Moore 2020; Salter & Blodgett 2017; Sedgman 2020; Yee 2019) into a key text for understanding persona.
Why is it important to study non-human persona?
Non-human personas are an under-researched area of persona studies that are particularly important to focus on as we enter a new generation of machine learning.
Non-human persona is a reimagining of persona from a singular, actualised performance in connection with a human entity to a collective act between ‘curator(s)’ (of the non-human persona) and various audiences. This is because machine learning has yet to advance in creating autonomous, artificial general intelligence (AGI) robots capable of independently organising and performing a fully actualised online persona. Although, things like self-driving cars, social media algorithms, and Generative AI tools appear very close. One day, we will experience an altogether non-human persona. For now, we must consider how various human and non-human actors collectively form non-human personas through an assemblage of digital artefacts*. This is precisely what my research intends to do.
Reflecting on my tendency to scramble when someone asks about my research led to the realisation that this stems from anxiety about not knowing *enough* or not being able to articulate complex ideas in simple terms. But I do know a lot about persona, and I should be confident in this. Otherwise, how can I expect others to be confident in my work? Unfortunately, I’m still working on the communicating part. And I will be for the duration of my studies. But these weekly blogs will help.
Glossary
*Digital artifacts are digital objects such as blogs, images, films, and singular social media profiles embedded in “complex, distributed and shifting digital media environments” such as the internet (Kallinikos et al. 2013, p. 358). Because they lack the materiality of tangible objects, digital artifacts are ‘quasi-objects’ with properties of editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness that give them a performative purpose – to simultaneously represent an object online and facilitate social relationships (Kallinikos et al. 2013). These unique properties facilitate an assemblage of digital artefacts to represent a consistent public presentation of ‘self’ (Marshall et al. 2020), even for non-human entities.
References
Barbour, K 2014, ‘Finding the Edge: Online persona creation by fringe artists’, PhD Thesis, Deakin University.
Barbour, K, Lee, K & Moore, C 2017, ‘Online Persona Research: An Instagram Case Study’, Persona Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 1–12.
Boucaut, R 2021, ‘“Oscar”: An Institutional and contested persona reading of the Academy Awards’, Persona Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 6–19.
Chandler, D & Munday, R 2020c, persona, <https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198841838.001.0001/acref-9780198841838-e-2010>.
Drenten, J & Brooks, G 2020, ‘Celebrity 2.0: Lil Miquela and the rise of a virtual star system’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 20, no. 8, pp. 1319–1323.
Giles, DC 2020, ‘A Typology of Persona as Suggested by Jungian Theory and the Evolving Persona Studies Literature’, Persona Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 15–29.
Goffman, E 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books, New York.
Holland, T 2021, ‘“My battery is low and it’s getting dark”: The opportunity Rover’s collective persona’, Persona Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, p. 11.
Humphrey, A 2017, ‘User Personas and Social Media Profiles’, Persona Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 13–20.
Jung, C 1983, Jung, selected writings, A Storr (ed), Jung, selected writings, Fontana Paperbacks, London.
Marshall, PD 2015, ‘Intercommunication and Persona: the Intercommunicative Public self’, International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Communication, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 23–31.
Marshall, PD 2014, ‘Persona studies: Mapping the proliferation of the public self’, Journalism, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 153–170.
Marshall, PD & Barbour, K 2015, ‘Making Intellectual Room for Persona Studies: a New Consciousness and a Shifted Perspective’, Persona Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, viewed 6 April 2021, <https://ojs.deakin.edu.au/index.php/ps/article/view/464>.
Marshall, PD, Moore, C & Barbour, K 2020, Persona studies: an introduction, Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken.
Marshall, PD, Moore, C & Barbour, K 2015, ‘Persona as method: exploring celebrity and the public self through persona studies’, Celebrity Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 288–305.
Moore, C 2020, ‘An approach to online fan persona’, Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 33, viewed 29 April 2021, <https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1703>.
Moore, C 2019, The Future of Content Part 1 – Paradigm Shift | Future Cultures, Future Cultures, viewed 8 October 2021, <https://futurecultures.blog/the-hub/the-future-of-content-part-1-paradigm-shift/>.
Moore, C & Barbour, K 2016, ‘Performing the Networks of Domestic and Public Persona’, Persona Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–11.
Moore, C, Barbour, K & Lee, K 2017, ‘Five Dimensions of Online Persona’, Persona Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1–12.
Salter, A & Blodgett, B 2017, ‘Alt-Right: Ctrl+A; Del’, Persona Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 76–77.
Sedgman, K 2020, ‘THE INSTITUTIONAL PERSONA: WHEN THEATRES BECOME PERSONAS AND THE CASE OF BRISTOL OLD VIC’, Persona Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 98–110.
Yee, T 2019, ‘Podcasting and Personal Brands: Mapping a Theoretical Path from Participatory Empowerment to Individual Persona Construction’, Persona Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 92–106.