Literally Ja'miezing: Exploring Podcast Personas and Participatory Media Culture
Abstract
My thesis investigates the nuances of online persona, celebrity and micro-celebrity personas, shifting media paradigms, and participatory media cultures that contribute to our understanding of podcast personas. Persona infers our ability to perform an individual self in negotiation with various collectives. Podcast personas challenge this idea of the self and offer a collectivised understanding of persona, where non-human digital objects are meta-collective personas, collaboratively negotiated by various individuals, technologies, audiences, and systems.
Through the lens of celebrification using presentational media technologies, I will argue that podcasts can be said to have personas that demonstrate how shifting media paradigms have blurred the distinction between producer and consumer. As a result of this changed perspective of parasocial relationships, the agency of the media, the audience and the individual to determine the value of a celebrity as a cultural commodity has shifted. Audience participation in a celebrity’s micro-publics now determines the power a celebrity has, highlighting the significance of participatory media cultures to the collective dimension of a podcast persona.
Podcast personas have received very little scholarly attention, and my thesis aims to address this gap. By grounding my analytical framework in the intersection between participatory culture theory and the emerging fields of persona studies and podcast studies, I explore Ja’miezing as a podcast persona engaging in micro-celebrity practice. Therefore, my thesis covers strategies for analysing podcast personas as a meta-collective complex.
FINDINGS OVERVIEW
Podcast personas are a complex network assemblage that incorporates micro-celebrity, non-human persona, shifting media paradigms, and participatory media culture.
The Ja’miezing case study reveals the potential for a new collectivised persona perspective that considers the negotiation between the individual and the collective as a critical element.
This meta-collective complex highlights the roles of presentational technologies, participatory media systems and platforms, the podcast producer and the participatory audience in collectively negotiating a podcast persona.
I provided a definition of podcast personas as public presentations of the self assembled through a podcast that involves a negotiation between the individual(digital objects) and the collective (micro-publics).
My definition emphasises the correlation between participatory media culture, intercommunication, and the collective dimension of the podcast persona
Through analysing the Ja’miezing case study using my framework, it became clear that the podcast persona involved a complex layering of personas, audiences, and satire. So, I examined the personas of Chris Lilley and his character, Ja’mie, in addition to the podcast persona.
Chris Lilley's persona
Lilley’s persona demonstrates his navigation of the tensions between his distant persona and the shift towards multisocial fan interactions.
It also establishes how shifted media paradigms displaced the agency of representational media industries to gatekeep celebritypower. Instead, the power to regulate public personas has shifted to a negotiation betweenthe media, audiences, and individuals.
Ja'mie's persona
Ja’mie’s persona is an early example of a non-human, fictional persona engaged in negotiations with a collective using presentational media technologies.
Lilley uses cringe comedy to contrast the ridiculousness of Ja’mie’s character with real people and environments to form a satire that works on two levels. Firstly, Ja’mie is a satire of young, white, affluent women in Australia, revealed through inconsistencies in her navigation of performance registers. Secondly, Lilley mocks documentaries and social media to critique the demotic turn.
JA'MIEZING'S persona
I concluded that in the case of Ja’miezing, a podcast could have a persona that was a negotiation between the individual (podcast episodes and official sites) and the collective (Ja’mieniacs and the technologies, systems, and platforms of participatory media cultures).
Ja’mieniacs (the podcast persona audience) demonstrate the properties of a participatory media culture and exhibit a multisocial relationship with the podcast persona, where audience engagement determines the persona’s value.
Lilly parodied influencer personas through the podcast persona’s ‘cringe’ navigation of performance registers to maintain multisocial relations with fans. Moreover, Lilley presents Ja’mie as an extreme representation of an influencer engaging in public intimacy to explore the nuances of Ja’mie’s cancellation.
The participatory nature of Ja’miezing’s fandom exhibits how micro-celebrities must facilitate fan communities through multi social relationships to maintain their value as a cultural commodity
LIMITATIONS
Ja’miezing is a complicated and unique case study. So, the conclusions presented in this thesis may be limited in their application to other case studies.