ORCID Profile
0000-0002-0418-4447
Current Organisations
Deakin University
,
Charles Sturt University
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Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 16-03-2022
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X221088052
Abstract: 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. It shows how including backend platform media practices deepen ethnographic understandings of platform use. The ‘Traceback method’ uses researcher-informant collaboration to document and reflect on the shifts of platform affordances that have reconfigured media practices, organisational structures, and economic incentives over time. We show how these methods proved useful in mapping Chinese-Australian media organisations’ deployment of WOAs for news production. Together these methods contribute ways to understand previously hidden aspects of media practice and platform governance in a novel methodological design, which may have wider application for future research.
Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
Date: 12-2000
DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.1887
Abstract: Renew is an awkward word. Its prefix seems to make its idea of something 'new' impossible. And everyday experience further underlines the contradiction. My first memory of using the word 'renew' was related to the anxiety of library overdue books: renewing those books was a pragmatic way to avoid the impending fines. This is a useful starting point for pondering any cultural moment of renewal. Renew describes the impetus towards change while acknowledging the past's weighted effect on producing any transformation. It articulates a challenged continuity rather than a break or discontinuity with a particular past. Where I would like to take this idea of renewal is into the realm of cultural studies and its continuing intellectual project through two efforts or essays. Essay 1: Recombinant Culture There are no doubt many ways to characterise the value of cultural studies. What I want to emphasise here is how cultural studies worked to transform the basic conceptualisation of culture itself. These are familiar paths but to identify some of the principal intellectual traits for rethinking and fundamentally renewing the definition of culture: the contested terrain of the popular the hegemonic restructuring of culture through winning and building of consent as a moving and transforming force and the concentration on the making of the "other" and the "other's" process of piecing together cultural sense Through all these paths the real power of cultural studies has been its ability to migrate into disciplines and work to renew their internal directions through challenge. Although naturalised homes for cultural studies have been found in media and communication programmes, this has been partly possible through their roughly contemporaneous emergence and partly through this sister intellectual project's capacity to deal seriously with popular culture. Where renewal has been more brazenly articulated is in sites such as geography and its turn to culture and space issues, English and its transformation of its object of study, or musicology with its rereading of popular music and its cadence of cultural meaning and, to a lesser extent sociology and history. What cultural studies has been is a migrating source of renewal across the humanities and social sciences. The core of cultural studies, which is much more difficult to define except in a listing of key concepts and strategies of cultural engagement through intellectual work (of which I provided only a partial list above), has not necessarily gone through this same pattern of renewal over the last 20 years. What I would like to propose here is a moment of rethinking what constitutes cultural studies. This goes beyond Richard Johnson's historical reading of what is cultural studies. Using a new metaphor to describe its approach may begin this renewal of the core. Cultural studies can be rearticulated in terms of its capacity at recombining. As I have indicated, cultural studies has worked to juxtapose its redefinitions of the cultural against and over these 19th century disciplines and has produced quite dramatic shifts in approaches within the disciplines and across the disciplines. Recombining then is the intellectual practice of cultural studies. It generally analyses the form of recombinations that emerge on the contemporary scene. Some have labelled this process hybridisation -- the work of Iain Chambers and Lydia Curti identifies the movements through borders and boundaries both physical and psychical. As a practice, cultural studies can debate and discuss the moments of rupture of the continuous (what previous approaches might call the ideological and naturalised veneer of historical continuity), but with the comprehension of how the rupture negotiates with the past and its ideological weight. In other words, cultural studies' practice is one of perpetual renewal through its study of recombinant culture. These moments of recombination can be seen in the structure of identity and cultural politics, where the stable structures of identity serve as much as political tactics as structures. Most visibly, recombinant culture can be the way to understand how new technologies are used and reformed through use by different cultural communities. Popular music provides a model for this continuous flow of recombining for both renewal and a shifted cultural significance. Sounds are s led past songs are layered into a significantly different music and use in current dance music. Recombinant culture may also be studied from the perspective of cultural industries and their efforts to incorporate new technologies into different forms in order to reconstitute audiences in ways that in their distinctiveness produce value that is exchangeable as capital. Understanding the constant negotiation of recombinant culture is where cultural studies should relocate its energies and renew its vitality. Essay 2: Refocussing on Cultural Production One of the successes of cultural studies is its well-developed reading of the practices of reception. The active audience approach has led to understanding how audiences use and contextualise cultural forms. Specifically studies in television, popular music and, to a lesser degree, film have benefitted from this rereading of popular culture and audiences. Clearly underdeveloped in cultural studies is an analysis of production. Yet the massive work on the active audience approach is fundamentally a study of cultural production, albeit in the terminology of reception. What is embedded in the active audience reading of cultural forms is the audience's will to produce the text. This reproduction of the text by the audience not only transforms the text, but also points to the very desire (by cultural studies' research itself in the same way that the researcher's reading of a subculture's political and cultural will was refracted through sartorial style and a cultural politics of street appropriation) for the will to produce in the audience. There is a moment in our recombinant culture that certain technologies have intensified the will to produce, if not production itself. The Internet and the World Wide Web have provided cultural studies a clear shift towards a production ethos that has altered the formal boundaries of what constitutes production. The user of the Internet actively plays the role of producer and audience, not just in terms of a heightened pattern of interactivity but in the regularity and routineness with which Websites appear as part of the general system of cultural production. Because all Websites are distributed and disseminated in one system or network the delineations that used to give television networks their nearly exclusive voice and image of authority are not as easily made via the Internet. This moment of production flux and the cultural politics it has generated is already contested as large media corporations work to differentiate content and "quality" so that websites are hierarchised into different registers of cultural value. What I am arguing for here is a renewal of study that now looks at a different starting point in the cycles of production and consumption for cultural studies. Production in this recombinant culture always implies a process of reception and recontextualisation of the past meanings into current objectives and directions. Cultural studies needs to investigate this current blending of production and consumption more vigorously. For instance, how does Napster shift the play of the production outwards into a myriad of possible recombining producer/consumers who make their music available for others? How is the large music publisher Bertelsmann engaging in a process of capitalising in some way on this process of dissemination through their negotiations with Napster? We are seeing enacted in this one case the changing landscape of cultural production and cultural consumption where the product, the property and the service are no longer clearly defined in either industrially or culturally agreed-upon standards. New media culture in general is operating on different criteria of cultural production and cultural consumption: products seem to be continually in process and in that process include their consumers into the process of production. This is clearly evident in the development of computer games as they include their core "audience" in transforming and improving their "product". The digitalisation of cultural forms has permitted the development of "soft-products": that is, products that can be changed and recombined and are therefore not so easily end-products but as entities are continually in process. Because cultural studies has such a well-developed understanding of the process of the transformation of meaning through its study of active reception, it is particularly valuable in interpreting how this recombinant culture is operating in and through new technologies. In a sense, cultural studies can be deployed in making sense of this transformed cultural economy. Through a shift in focus from consumption to production (but fundamentally working with the same insights about cultural meaning, activity and production), the intellectual project of cultural studies can successfully renew itself. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall. "Renewing Cultural Studies." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] c/0012/studies.php . Chicago style: P. David Marshall, "Renewing Cultural Studies," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), c/0012/studies.php ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall. (2000) Renewing Cultural Studies. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). c/0012/studies.php ([your date of access]).
Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
Date: 27-08-2008
DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.74
Abstract: 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 audience of readers and the produced texts, leading to something that has been called a “sphere” in its grandiose claims and a “community” in its slightly more modest conceit. To publish is to produce a different form of conversation, one that is abstracted from the oral into the written and then presumably back out into both written and spoken, thereby producing new circuits of interchange and exchange.Circulating through the concept of publish are a number of other associations. There is an industry that has organised what appears in printed form for centuries. To publish has often involved passing through the various gatekeepers, some economic, some cultural, and some connected to knowledge societies. And publish, as a concept, thus also has complicated relationships to authors and ownership, as forms of intellectual property and copyright have organised the distribution of published materials. Technology and its capacities have always had a close association with the capacity to publish. The printing press, for instance, along with the light-weight technology of paper, permitted the mass reproduction and distribution of printed materials. Depending on where you lie on the spectrum of technological determinism, these technologies led to the development of publics or at minimum were part of a cluster of events—technological, economic, and cultural—which led to the publishing industries and wider reading publics. The most significant transformation of this system of production and delivery has been the technology of the Internet. Because of the capacity to self-publish—that is, to simultaneously produce and distribute your work online in a high-quality format—the formidable publishing industry is at least challenged by the new distribution of information. The title of this issue has been chosen with some thought. This is the 10th anniversary of the launch of M/C—a publishing experiment that embraced the new possibilities of getting ideas disseminated that the Internet had to offer. I (David) remember quite vividly the moment where we went live with our first issue and pressing the button at the Brisbane Internet café, which at least metaphorically brought the journal to its public life. I also remember the giddy sensation of measuring our “hits” through our installed counter and thereby getting the statistical breakdown of what countries, what time of day, what Internet browser visitors were using, and what day of the week our new readers were s ling our journal. In a sense, through M/C we had broken at least some of the gates that determined publishing patterns in academic circles for most of the last century. But what was also interesting was the kinds of internal gates that we constructed to legitimise our enterprise, to give it academic standing, and to ensure its very longevity. We moved in three directions: first we worked diligently on building the reviewing system to ensure through some measure that what we produced had a sense of quality and intellectual integrity. After all, one of our first insights was that unlike a print journal and its costs, there were no limits to how long any of our “issues” had to be: we could accept 100 submissions if we wanted to on a particular theme. Time was the scarce commodity—not only our time, but also our readers’ use of time. And as one of the articles in this issue explores, we were advancing quite resolutely towards academic legitimacy (Mitchell). Second, we also worked on how to adopt, adapt, and innovate to the exigencies of the new platform of delivery. Here we were thinking about different kinds of content as well as the frequency of the change in content to keep our users connected to our site. Emerging from that process was the sister “publication” M/C Reviews, which worked under decidedly different systems of review, distinctive and sometime continuous systems of production and publishing, and over time a clearly different tone and style in its type of engagement with the unfolding of cultural life and practices. Third, we worked on establishing the distinctiveness of the approach where we blended an intellectual delivery in combination with openness in writing style. The objective at least was to make it readable by a wider public even though it would be drawing on the expertise of academics and intellectuals. Perhaps what has been interesting about the M/C experiment is how patterns emerged and consistency developed over time. The single-word concept, the associated artwork, the length of articles, and in general even the number of articles per issue all became quite similar from issue to issue. Within those patterns, the sediments of pre-Internet publishing informed the new circuits of production, reception, and response that we had developed through the online journal.This issue of M/C Journal continues the publishing tradition and indeed reproduces the patterns of its first issues. What you will find in the lighted screen that now serves as the everyday and even mundane reading tablet, is an issue that dissects the idea of “publish”. We begin with an enlightened article by Sherman Young on the new reading toys that have emerged in this era of digital publishing where we move lugubriously towards the acceptance of the reading screen over as well as beside the beautifully portable and tactile format of the book and the magazine. Our second article by Johanne Provençal provides a pre-ambulatory speed-crawl through the history of publishing to inform the development/status of Canadian academic publishing. The bizarre but beautiful world of academic publishing has generated three related texts. We move from Guy Redden’s article on academic publishing and its forms of adjudication of quality to Bruno Starrs’s study of how doctorates by publication have generated an uneven spectrum of quality. Peta Mitchell’s article on M/C Journal investigates how online academic publishing and what can be called open source publishing have exposed some of the fault-lines in intellectual work and its determination of value. The digital ide is explored further through Ianto Ware’s exegesis of how it plays across a generational ide of understanding about what constitutes engagement in the new publishing publics. Susan Currie and Donna Lee Brien investigate the hypothetical that there has been a growth in life writing through a closer look at the inconsistent publishing and sales data details of biographies and autobiographies over the last century. And the issue concludes with Annette Patterson and Kerry Mallan’s study of the post-digital through a closer reflection on the digitalisation of Australian children’s literature through the CLDR.Ten years later, the M/C publishing experiment continues and more or less advances along the three trajectories outlined above. And its continuity is a collective process and a collaborative vision that has depended on many contributors, but none more centrally than Axel Bruns. I want to thank Axel Bruns and to dedicate this issue to both his legacy and the legacy of the first members of the editorial collective that began the experiment in early 1998. Thanks to your first excessive but most valued devotion of time and effort, M/C was launched into the fractious world of publishing. And on behalf of Peta Mitchell and myself, thanks to the work of everyone who helped make this particular issue come to life and hopefully match the quality and the vision that M/C has developed over these ten years. So, enjoy this issue and in a smarmy moment of nostalgia I will end this editorial with the single word that I ended my first editorial: engage.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 28-09-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-2010
Abstract: 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.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-03-2010
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2016
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-2011
Publisher: Deakin University
Date: 30-04-2023
DOI: 10.21153/PSJ2023VOL9NO3ART1720
Abstract: 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 two athletes who used their personal reputation whilst at this highly mediated global sporting event to raise the visibility of societal issues. Through the lens of persona studies, this research examined how these athlete celebrities crafted in idualised narratives through internetworked platforms of new and traditional media to demonstrate forms of athlete citizenship. This research illustrates how athletes can become co-creators of the social cause narrative, demonstrating how valuable athletes can be in lifying the core values of major sporting events by reinforcing a fluid form of intercommunication.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2000
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2016
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2013
Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
Date: 11-2004
DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2401
Abstract: There was a moment just after September 11, 2001, that many commentators heralded the end of our celebrity obsessions and the emergence of a new sobriety in politics and culture. We had the mediated version of atonement when the famous presented their most serious sides for television specials in support of the families of the victims of the September 11 attacks. But within a matter of weeks the celebrity industry was back on its old track – salacious rumors about J-Lo and her movement through the entertainment industry A-List, further debates about the propriety of Michael Jackson’s behaviour, Demi Moore’s new love interest Ashton Kutcher – who is and was young enough to be her son and so on. The machine and industry that had been in place tested whether it could continue its dance with public intimacy and private turmoils of the rich and famed. Fame is both fickle and incredibly enduring. It relies on a public in idual’s connection to an audience and how that persona can embody some form of affective investment (Marshall, Celebrity and Power). Audience’s loyalty can migrate, but the machinery of fame can produce new variations for newly minted moments of affection or even its opposite, intense dislike. What is enduring is the process. There is the manufacture of celebrities and stars that were produced with regularity by the old movie studios in the first half of the twentieth century that are now produced with astonishing levels of success through the current array of reality/game shows via television. Beyond these public variations, there is the will-to-fame that is expressed by the various webcam sites and weblogs where a new era of public narcissism is mutating with new media forms. This issue deals with fame but it is not alone. The academy has embraced the study of celebrity and fame over the last decade and it has accelerated in recent years. Sport stardom (Andrews and Jackson), film stardom (Austin and Barker), literary celebrity (Moran Glass), journalism and celebrity (Ponce de Leon Marshall, “Intimately Intertwined”), the psychology of fame (Giles), and media and the celebrity (Turner Marshall, Celebrity and Power) have appeared as full-fledged books with the regularity that echoes the celebrity system’s own production process. This burgeoning interest in fame cuts across disciplinary study in surprising ways. Chris Rojek’s discussion of religion and celebrity is but one interesting recent variation in the study of fame (Rojek). The interest in this issue has been impressive and, for an editor, at times overwhelming. Nonetheless, we have collected an intriguing array of articles to advance the study of fame and to engage with the way it reflects and refracts the complex crystalline structure of popular culture. Understanding fame demands a form of perceptive interdisciplinarity that our group of 18 authors has worked to achieve. Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell’s article on how Christopher Reeve’s fame has transformed and disciplined international debates on disability to narrowly focus on the agenda of the “cure” serves as our feature article. The article paints a fascinating picture on the reconstruction of this particular dimension of the public sphere via the agency of a persona. Goggin and Newell’s writing is particularly valuable to understand the legacy of Reeve since his recent death and how it will continue to shape the concepts of disability for years if not decades to come. Dealing with Ziggy Stardust, the contrived fictional star that Bowie incarnated in the early 1970s, allows Suzanne Rintoul to work through how celebrity and fame provide a discursive narrative that can be the source for performance of the public self. Bowie plays with ironic distance that is understood as a debate about authenticity in a way that is implicitly understood as a trope of contemporary popular culture and the audience’s understanding of popular figures. William Tregonning explains that authenticity remains a central feature of how the famed – in popular music at the very least – refer to their identities. Via Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and Christine Aguilera, the author weaves a reading of their moments of their publicly reported self-reflection that entreats their audiences to understand their desire to be seen as real and identical to their pre-famous identities despite/because of their heavily hyped and inauthentic pop presence. Jonathan Goldman’s reading of Charlie Chaplin provides one of the more fascinating intertextual readings of how the famed persona can be used and turned back towards the production of the film narrative and how it can be read by audiences. Goldman deftly reads the closing image of the film Modern Times as an epigraph that identifies how the extratextual of celebrity and persona flow back into informing the reading of an actor’s work. And all of this “work” is done quite consciously by Chaplin as his own persona – his “trademark” as tr – can work as a powerful shorthand for his films. Gordon Fletcher provides an entry point to determine the extent and reach of fame through a study of the frequency with which different public figures’ names are used in Internet searches. Fletcher’s work presents “an index of fame” as these particular personalities intersect with the promotional culture’s intentions via releases and with specific events that have clear connections to public in iduals. The Web serves as a way to map these cultural trends in a manner that was more difficult to undertake in the past. Reality television internationally has produced famous people with astounding regularity and three of our authors have tried to address the way in which television practices have articulated fame and celebritydom. Su Holmes’s inspection of reality television programmes explicates that the production of the celebrity is revealed as much as traditional notions of earning one’s acclaim through talent, hard work and understanding the industry. Tom Mole’s “hypertrophic celebrity” refers to the way that the entertainment industry via reality television has engaged in many more ways of promoting and cross-promoting in iduals through a variety of technologies and “intertextual networks”. Ultimately, it is the formats that have been more successful and sustained than any in idual star that is created and quickly disappears. Mole indicates that observing this element of celebrity culture reveals a great deal about the new machinations of sophistication of the entertainment industry. Douglas Fairchild’s study of Australian Idol dovetails into Mole’s insights. One of the lacunae of research in popular music, according to Fairchild, is the operation of public relations in musical cultural production. Fairchild draws on research that discusses how the “attention economy” wraps around contemporary cultural production through the techniques of publicity and public relations to deepen their significance and play in popular culture. The decline in recorded music – or its change to downloading – has demanded a refocusing of an industry to make particular in iduals as entertainment stars that move between the media of television and music (and other cultural forms and venues if possible) and thereby produce a strong ertissement for the attention economy. Fame and infamy blur in David Schmid’s study of the collection of serial killer memorabilia online. Collectors are condemned for their fascination, but contemporary culture’s relationship to the fetish objects of infamy demands a more careful reading. Schmid relates the fascination with how central serial killers are to the celebrity system and “America” and become prominent idols for consumption – to paraphrase Leo Lowenthal. In three of our articles, artistic practices are investigated but from quite different perspectives. It seems almost de rigeur to have some mention of Andy Warhol in an issue devoted to fame. Michael Angelo Tata’s work moves laterally (which is always appropriate for Warhol…) along the surface of Warhol to debate his ruminations of the fabrication of the self through his fascination and play with the world of modeling. Davin Heckman explores the production of persona not through the extensions of fame provided by contemporary mass media, but rather through the intensive production of graffiti tags in Los Angeles by the irrepressible “Chaka”. Heckman’s study of fame makes us think how the enigmatic can be played out in a geographical space (contemporary Los Angeles) that is inundated with the production of other images of fame. Carrie LeBlanc’s analysis of the British celebrity-artist Damien Hirst attempts to tread the line between the value of the artist persona to the meaning of artistic practice and what we could now call – thanks to Fairchild’s article in this issue – the ‘attention economy’ that circulates around the meaning of the artist and art work. Celebrity is integral to the interpretation of Hirst and his working class persona is integral to his play in British media as much as the meaning of his shock-art. The Harry Potter phenomenon has produced a number of famed in iduals, from its author to the actors associated with the three principal roles but this fame presents an elaborate textual field that becomes the territory of fan fiction. Lelia Green and Carmen Guinery investigate the permutations of fame that envelope fan fiction and provide one of the motivations for fan fiction authors and the expansion of their influence among fan groups. Fame is a kind of moving signification system that draws on popular culture fragments and elements to buttress the centrality of its various personalities. Mohmin Rahman has posited that David Beckham’s fame in both photos in magazines and in descriptions of his body rely knowingly on queer iconography but only as a surface meaning system. Ultimately, Beckham after playing with the codes of queer must reassert the bedrock of his identity through heterosexuality nonetheless, Rahman identifies the uses made of queer representations in displaying the male sporting hero in the most coded way. The last two articles deal with the politics of fame and its projections on to obvious personas. Paul Allatson writes a wonderful review of the existent but non-existent Elián Gonzalez and how the virtual Elián is deployed as a persona for all sorts of positions in the United States and Cuba for specific political ends. As much as Elián was converted and passed between countries, the virtual Elián becomes a vessel for the construction of a variety of political postures that can be framed in national desires and ethnic ambitions. Kevin Howley, drawing insights from the remarkable reincarnation of the legacy of Reagan through his death and funeral, provides an outline of how the myth of the famed president is maintained and actively fostered by a variety of groups. Embedded in the production of Reagan in death is his originary filmic persona, transplanted into the Teflon presidency and finally into a conservative politics of the future of the right. This collection on the concept of fame provides an intellectual gestalt of the some of the tropes that circulate around the production of public personalities. The ephemeral nature of fame means that it can be attached to and detached from in iduals relatively easily. Fame is surface meaning that may correlate with deeper issues and more profound essences, but fundamentally fame is designed to be a play on the surface and to allow that surface pattern to circulate widely across a culture or, on occasion, transculturally. Fame moves readily and easily between the domains of the public and the private for public consumption. Reading the production of fame is a reading of popular culture itself as it is reproduced and expanded via its various forms of mediation. In this issue of M/C Journal, we can see the dispositifs of how public identities – the material instances of fame production – refract publics and popular desires. Dig into the various narratives of fame that these 16 articles present – they are both intellectually challenging and – in the wonderful tradition of M/C Journal – great reads as well. References Andrews, David, and Steven Jackson (eds.). Sport Stars: The Cultural Politics of the Sporting Celebrity. London: Routledge, 2001. Austin, Thomas and Martin Barker (eds.). Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. London: Edward Arnold, 2003. Glass, Loren. Authors Inc: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States. New York: New York UP, 2004. Marshall, P. David. “Intimately Intertwined in the Most Public Way: Celebrity and Journalism.” Journalism: Critical Issues. Ed. Stuart Allen. Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK: McGraw-Hill/Open UP, 2005. 19-29 Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1997. Moran, Joe. Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. Pluto Press, 2000. Ponce De Leon, Charles S. Self-Exposure: Human Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill, N.C.: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion, 2001. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Marshall, P. David. "Fame's Perpetual Moment." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y') ? journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/01-editorial.php . APA Style Marshall, P. (Nov. 2004) "Fame's Perpetual Moment," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y') ? from journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/01-editorial.php .
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2020
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 2018
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 16-03-2017
Publisher: Common Ground Research Networks
Date: 2015
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 15-01-2015
DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199756841-0159
Abstract: 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 psychology, and even anthropology and history have been part of its analysis. Celebrity identifies the “extra-textual” dimensions of the famous, in which the lives of the renowned are followed, read, and reported. It is a public celebration of in iduality that is (but not exclusively) connected to consumer culture and democratic capitalism. Through these larger cultural tropes celebrity has had its strongest affiliations with the contemporary entertainment industries, particularly in terms of how they are covered by the media and the press for further value beyond the cultural forms that are often the origins of stardom—the public in idual’s performances in fields such as film, television, sport, and popular music. Celebrity is a site of celebration and derogation in any culture: these public in iduals are truly exalted and given a status beyond others, but they are also ridiculed for their believed-to-be unearned credentials for having such a public platform and voice. Moreover, the study of celebrity and public persona is also an investigation into the connection between the populace and these public personalities, where parasocial relations most evident in fandom identify how celebrities embody audiences with an affective connection that is truly powerful in contemporary culture. That power of embodiment and connection that celebrities possess is subsequently exploited by the media industries to promote and sell new connected cultural products. Identifying celebrities as part of a spectrum of public personas links the study of celebrity to the investigation of the celebrated and famed in a variety of professions and fields well beyond entertainment. Thus, the term persona is used in these studies of public personalities to acknowledge the mask that is deployed to present a public version of the self for this external consumption and reading by an audience, a collective, a network, a nation, a citizenry, or a community. Research into public personas has led to related studies of political leadership, self-branding, notoriety in business, and reputation management, and research delves into the presentation of the public self by greater portions of the populace in online cultures. Celebrity and public persona is a field in which research aims to investigate the significance and meaning of various versions of the public self in both contemporary culture and historically.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-10-2015
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-09-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-2015
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X1515600109
Abstract: 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.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-05-2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-06-2013
Abstract: 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.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 03-01-2019
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-10-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-2015
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X1515600114
Abstract: At its core, the power of the public intellectual is the capacity to make ideas move through a culture. This article 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. Part of the article reports on a research project that has studied academic personas online and explores what can be described as ‘registers of online performance’ that they inhabit through their online selves. The research reveals that public intellectuals have to interpret effectively that online culture privileges what is identified as ‘presentational media’: the in idual as opposed to the media is the channel through which information moves and is exchanged online, and it is essentially a presentation of the self that has to be integrated into the ideas and messages. From this initial analysis/categorisation of academic persona online, the article investigates the online magazine The Conversation, which blends journalism with academic expertise in its production of news stories. The article concludes with some of the key elements that are part of the power of the public intellectual online.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-10-2015
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-10-2015
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-06-2021
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Date: 10-2016
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2016
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-10-2015
Publisher: Deakin University
Date: 30-04-2015
DOI: 10.21153/PS2015VOL1NO1ART464
Abstract: 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 exhibition of personas. Something quite extraordinary has shifted over the last twenty years that has led to this intensive focus on constructing strategic masks of identity. The catalyst is the development of online culture and its invocation to personalize the expression of a public self—essentially a persona—regularly and incessantly. This culture of producing and monitoring our public selves is the focus of this journal as online culture blends with everyday culture and leads to an insistent proliferation of personas for both presentation and for strategic purposes in order to manage very new notions of value and reputation. The task of investigating persona is complex, and is dependent on connections and intersections across an array of disciplines. This journal and the field of Persona Studies is designed to serve as a site for this essential work of comprehending, analysing, and critiquing persona, and to allow disciplines to intersect, exchange ideas, and debate the play of persona historically and in contemporary culture.
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Date: 15-08-2014
Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
Date: 11-06-2014
DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.802
Abstract: No man [...] can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true. (Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter – as seen and pondered by Tony Soprano at Bowdoin College, The Sopranos, Season 1, Episode 5: “College”)The fictitious is a particular and varied source of insight into the everyday world. The idea of seriality—with its variations of the serial, series, seriated—is very much connected to our patterns of entertainment. In this essay, I want to begin the process of testing what values and meanings can be drawn from the idea of seriality into comprehending the play of persona in contemporary culture. From a brief overview of the intersection of persona and seriality as well as a review of the deployment of seriality in popular culture, the article focuses on the character/ person-actor relationship to demonstrate how seriality produces persona. The French term for character—personnage—will be used to underline the clear relations between characterisation, person, and persona which have been developed by the recent work by Lenain and Wiame. Personnage, through its variation on the word person helps push the analysis into fully understanding the particular and integrated configuration between a public persona and the fictional role that an actor inhabits (Heinich).There are several qualities related to persona that allow this movement from the fictional world to the everyday world to be profitable. Persona, in terms of origins, in and of itself implies performance and display. Jung, for instance, calls persona a mask where one is “acting a role” (167) while Goffman considers that performance and roles are at the centre of everyday life and everyday forms and patterns of communication. In recent work, I have use persona to describe how online culture pushes most people to construct a public identity that resembles what celebrities have had to construct for their livelihood for at least the last century (“Persona” “Self”). My work has expanded to an investigation of how online persona relates to in idual agency (“Agency”) and professional postures and positioning (Barbour and Marshall).The fictive constructions then are intensified versions of what persona is addressing: the fabrication of a role for particular directions and ends. Characters or personnages are constructed personas for very directed ends. Their limitation to the study of persona as a dimension of public culture is that they are not real however, when one thinks of the actor who takes on this fictive identity, there is clearly a relationship between the real personality and that of the character. Moreover, as Nayar’s analysis of highly famous characters that are fictitious reveals, these celebrated characters, such as Harry Potter or Wolverine, sometime take on a public presence in and of themselves. To capture this public movement of a fictional character, Nayar blends the terms celebrity with fiction and calls these semi-public/semi-real entities “celefiction”: the characters are famous, highly visible, and move across media, information, and cultural platforms with ease and speed (18-20). Their celebrity status underlines their power to move outside of their primary text into public discourse and through public spaces—an extra-textual movement which fundamentally defines what a celebrity embodies.Seriality has to be seen as fundamental to a personnage’s power of and extension into the public world. For instance with Harry Potter again, at least some of his recognition is dependent on the linking or seriating the related books and movies. Seriality helps organise our sense of affective connection to our popular culture. The familiarity of some element of repetition is both comforting for audiences and provides at least a sense of guarantee or warranty that they will enjoy the future text as much as they enjoyed the past related text. Seriality, though, also produces a myriad of other effects and affects which provides a useful background to understand its utility in both the understanding of character and its value in investigating contemporary public persona. Etymologically, the words “series” and seriality are from the Latin and refer to “succession” in classical usage and are identified with ancestry and the patterns of identification and linking descendants (Oxford English Dictionary). The original use of the seriality highlights its value in understanding the formation of the constitution of person and persona and how the past and ancestry connect in series to the current or contemporary self. Its current usage, however, has broadened metaphorically outwards to identify anything that is in sequence or linked or joined: it can be a series of lectures and arguments or a related mark of cars manufactured in a manner that are stylistically linked. It has since been deployed to capture the production process of various cultural forms and one of the key origins of this usage came from the 19th century novel. There are many ex les where the 19th century novel was sold and presented in serial form that are too numerous to even summarise here. It is useful to use Dickens’ serial production as a defining ex le of how seriality moved into popular culture and the entertainment industry more broadly. Part of the reason for the sheer length of many of Charles Dickens’ works related to their original distribution as serials. In fact, all his novels were first distributed in chapters in monthly form in magazines or newspapers. A number of related consequences from Dickens’ serialisation are relevant to understanding seriality in entertainment culture more widely (Hayward). First, his novel serialisation established a continuous connection to his readers over years. Thus Dickens’ name itself became synonymous and connected to an international reading public. Second, his use of seriality established a production form that was seen to be more affordable to its audience: seriality has to be understood as a form that is closely connected to economies and markets as cultural commodities kneaded their way into the structure of everyday life. And third, seriality established through repetition not only the author’s name but also the name of the key characters that populated the cultural form. Although not wholly attributable to the serial nature of the delivery, the characters such as Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge or David Copperfield along with a host of other major and minor players in his many books become integrated into everyday discourse because of their ever-presence and delayed delivery over stories over time (see Allen 78-79). In the same way that newspapers became part of the vernacular of contemporary culture, fictional characters from novels lived for years at a time in the consciousness of this large reading public. The characters or personnages themselves became personalities that through usage became a way of describing other behaviours. One can think of Uriah Heep and his sheer obsequiousness in David Copperfield as a character-type that became part of popular culture thinking and expressing a clear negative sentiment about a personality trait. In the twentieth century, serials became associated much more with book series. One of the more successful serial genres was the murder mystery. It developed what could be described as recognisable personnages that were both fictional and real. Thus, the real Agatha Christie with her consistent and prodigious production of short who-dunnit novels was linked to her Belgian fictional detective Hercule Poirot. Variations of these serial constructions occurred in children’s fiction, the emerging science fiction genre, and westerns with authors and characters rising to related prominence.In a similar vein, early to mid-twentieth century film produced the film serial. In its production and exhibition, the film serial was a déclassé genre in its overt emphasis on the economic quality of seriality. Thus, the film serial was generally a filler genre that was interspersed before and after a feature film in screenings (Dixon). As well as producing a familiarity with characters such as Flash Gordon, it was also instrumental in producing actors with a public profile that grew from this repetition. Flash Gordon was not just a character he was also the actor Buster Crabbe and, over time, the association became indissoluble for audiences and actor alike. Feature film serials also developed in the first half-century of American cinema in particular with child actors like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland often reprising variations of their previous roles. Seriality more or less became the standard form of delivery of broadcast media for most of the last 70 years and this was driven by the economies of production it developed. Whether the production was news, comedy, or drama, most radio and television forms were and are variation of serials. As well as being the zenith of seriality, television serials have been the most studied form of seriality of all cultural forms and are thus the greatest source of research into what serials actually produced. The classic serial that began on radio and migrated to television was the soap opera. Although most of the long-running soap operas have now disappeared, many have endured for more than 30 years with the American series The Guiding Light lasting 72 years and the British soap Coronation Street now in its 64th year. Australian nighttime soap operas have managed a similar longevity: Neighbours is in its 30th year, while Home and Away is in its 27th year. Much of the analyses of soap operas and serials deals with the narrative and the potential long narrative arcs related to characters and storylines. In contrast to most evening television serials historically, soap operas maintain the continuity from one episode to the next in an unbroken continuity narrative. Evening television serials, such as situation comedies, while maintaining long arcs over their run are episodic in nature: the structure of the story is generally concluded in the given episode with at least partial closure in a manner that is never engaged with in the never-ending soap opera serials.Although there are other cultural forms that deploy seriality in their structures—one can think of comic books and manga as two obvious other connected and highly visible serial sources—online and video games represent the other key media platform of serials in contemporary culture. Once again, a “horizon of expectation” (Jauss and De Man 23) motivates the iteration of new versions of games by the industry. New versions of games are designed to build on gamer loyalties while augmenting the quality and possibilities of the particular game. Game culture and gamers have a different structural relationship to serials which at least Denson and Jahn-Sudmann describe as digital seriality: a new version of a game is also imagined to be technologically more sophisticated in its production values and this transformation of the similitude of game structure with innovation drives the economy of what are often described as “franchises.” New versions of Minecraft as online upgrades or Call of Duty launches draw the literal reinvestment of the gamer. New consoles provide a further push to serialisation of games as they accentuate some transformed quality in gameplay, interaction, or quality of animated graphics. Sports franchises are perhaps the most serialised form of game: to replicate new professional seasons in each major sport, the sports game transforms with a new coterie of players each year.From these various venues, one can see the centrality of seriality in cultural forms. There is no question that one of the dimensions of seriality that transcends these cultural forms is its coordination and intersection with the development of the industrialisation of culture and this understanding of the economic motivation behind series has been explored from some of the earliest analyses of seriality (see Hagedorn Browne). Also, seriality has been mined extensively in terms of its production of the pleasure of repetition and transformation. The exploration of the popular, whether in studies of readers of romance fiction (Radway), or fans of science fiction television (Tulloch and Jenkins Jenkins), serials have provided the resource for the exploration of the power of the audience to connect, engage and reconstruct texts.The analysis of the serialisation of character—the production of a public personnage—and its relation to persona surprisingly has been understudied. While certain writers have remarked on the longevity of a certain character, such as Vicky Lord’s 40 year character on the soap opera One Life to Live, and the interesting capacity to maintain both complicated and hidden storylines (de Kosnik), and fan audience studies have looked at the parasocial-familiar relationship that fan and character construct, less has been developed about the relationship of the serial character, the actor and a form of twinned public identity. Seriality does produce a patterning of personnage, a structure of familiarity for the audience, but also a structure of performance for the actor. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis of the character of Fu Manchu, Mayer is able to discern how a patterning of iconic form shapes, replicates, and reiterates the look of Fu Manchu across decades of films (Mayer). Similarly, there has been a certain work on the “taxonomy of character” where the serial character of a television program is analysed in terms of 6 parts: physical traits/appearance speech patterns, psychological traits/habitual behaviours interaction with other characters environment biography (Pearson quoted in Lotz).From seriality what emerges is a particular kind of “type-casting” where the actor becomes wedded to the specific iteration of the taxonomy of performance. As with other elements related to seriality, serial character performance is also closely aligned to the economic. Previously I have described this economic patterning of performance the “John Wayne Syndrome.” Wayne’s career developed into a form of serial performance where the in idual born as Marion Morrison becomes structured into a cultural and economic category that determines the next film role. The economic weight of type also constructs the limits and range of the actor. Type or typage as a form of casting has always been an element of film and theatrical performance but it is the seriality of performance—the actual construction of a personnage that flows between the fictional and real person—that allows an actor to claim a persona that can be exchanged within the industry. Even 15 years after his death, Wayne remained one of the most popular performers in the United States, his status unrivalled in its close definition of American value that became wedded with a conservative masculinity and politics (Wills).Type and typecasting have an interesting relationship to seriality. From Eisenstein’s original use of the term typage, where the character is chosen to fit into the meaning of the film and the image was placed into its sequence to make that meaning, it generally describes the circumscribing of the actor into their look. As Wojcik’s analysis reveals, typecasting in various periods of theatre and film acting has been seen as something to be fought for by actors (in the 1850s) and actively resisted in Hollywood in 1950 by the Screen Actors Guild in support of more range of roles for each actor. It is also seen as something that leads to cultural stereotypes that can reinforce the racial profiling that has haunted erse cultures and the dangers of law enforcement for centuries (Wojcik 169-71). Early writers in the study of film acting, emphasised that its difference from theatre was that in film the actor and character converged in terms of connected reality and a physicality: the film actor was less a mask and more a sense of “being”(Kracauer). Cavell’s work suggested film over stage performance allowed an in iduality over type to emerge (34). Thompson’s semiotic “commutation” test was another way of assessing the power of the in idual “star” actor to be seen as elemental to the construction and meaning of the film role Television produced with regularity character-actors where performance and identity became indissoluble partly because of the sheer repetition and the massive visibility of these seriated performances.One of the most typecast in iduals in television history was Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek: although the original Star Trek series ran for only three seasons, the physical caricature of Spock in the series as a half-Vulcan and half-human made it difficult for the actor Nimoy to exit the role (Laws). Indeed, his famous autobiography riffed on this mis-identity with the forceful but still economically powerful title I am Not Spock in 1975. When Nimoy perceived that his fans thought that he was unhappy in his role as Spock, he published a further tome—I Am Spock—that righted his relationship to his fictional identity and its continued source of roles for the previous 30 years. Although it is usually perceived as quite different in its constitution of a public identity, a very similar structure of persona developed around the American CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. With his status as anchor confirmed in its power and centrality to American culture in his desk reportage of the assassination and death of President Kennedy in November 1963, Cronkite went on to inhabit a persona as the most trusted man in the United States by the sheer gravitas of hosting the Evening News stripped across every weeknight at 6:30pm for the next 19 years. In contrast to Nimoy, Cronkite became Cronkite the television news anchor, where persona, actor, and professional identity merged—at least in terms of almost all forms of the man’s visibility.From this vantage point of understanding the seriality of character ersonnage and how it informs the idea of the actor, I want to provide a longer conclusion about how seriality informs the concept of persona in the contemporary moment. First of all, what this study reveals is the way in which the production of identity is overlaid onto any conception of identity itself. If we can understand persona not in any negative formulation, but rather as a form of productive performance of a public self, then it becomes very useful to see that these very visible public blendings of performance and the actor-self can make sense more generally as to how the public self is produced and constituted. My final and concluding ex les will try and elucidate this insight further.In 2013, Netflix launched into the production of original drama with its release of House of Cards. The series itself was remarkable for a number of reasons. First among them, it was positioned as a quality series and clearly connected to the lineage of recent American subscription television programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Madmen, The Wire, Deadwood, and True Blood among a few others. House of Cards was an Americanised version of a celebrated British mini-series. In the American version, an ambitious party whip, Frank Underwood, manoeuvres with ruthlessness and the calculating support of his wife closer to the presidency and the heart and soul of American power. How the series expressed quality was at least partially in its choice of actors. The role of Frank Underwood was played by the respected film actor Kevin Spacey. His wife, Clare, was played by the equally high profile Robin Warren. Quality was also expressed through the connection of the audience of viewers to an anti-hero: a personnage that was not filled with virtue but moved with Machiavellian acuity towards his objective of ultimate power. This idea of quality emerged in many ways from the successful construction of the character of Tony Soprano by James Gandolfini in the acclaimed HBO television series The Sopranos that reconstructed the very conception of the family in organised crime. Tony Soprano was enacted as complex and conflicted with a sense of right and justice, but embedded in the personnage were psychological tropes and scars, and an understanding of the need for violence to maintain influence power and a perverse but natural sense of order (Martin).The new television serial character now embodied a larger code and coterie of acting: from The Sopranos, there is the underlying sense and sensibility of method acting (see Vineberg Stanislavski). Gandolfini inhabited the role of Tony Soprano and used the inner and hidden drives and motivations to become the source for the display of the character. Likewise, Spacey inhabits Frank Underwood. In that new habitus of television character, the actor becomes subsumed by the role. Gandolfini becomes both over-determined by the role and his own identity as an actor becomes melded to the role. Kevin Spacey, despite his longer and highly visible history as a film actor is overwhelmed by the televisual role of Frank Underwood. Its serial power, where audiences connect for hours and hours, where the actor commits to weeks and weeks of shoots, and years and years of being the character—a serious character with emotional depth, with psychological motivation that rivals the most visceral of film roles—transforms the actor into a blended public person and the related personnage.This blend of fictional and public life is complex as much for the producing actor as it is for the audience that makes the habitus real. What Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood inhabit is a blended persona, whose power is dependent on the constructed identity that is at source the actor’s production as much as any institutional form or any writer or director connected to making House of Cards “real.” There is no question that this serial public identity will be difficult for Kevin Spacey to disentangle when the series ends in many ways it will be an elemental part of his continuing public identity. This is the economic power and risk of seriality.One can see similar blendings in the persona in popular music and its own form of contemporary seriality in performance. For ex le, Eminem is a stage name for a person sometimes called Marshall Mathers but Eminem takes this a step further and produces beyond a character in its integration of the personal—a real personnage, Slim Shady, to inhabit his music and its stories. To further complexify this construction, Eminem relies on the production of his stories with elements that appear to be from his everyday life (Dawkins). His characterisations because of the emotional depth he inhabits through his rapped stories betray a connection to his own psychological state. Following in the history of popular music performance where the singer-songwriter’s work is seen by all to present a version of the public self that is closer emotionally to the private self, we once again see how the seriality of performance begins to produce a blended public persona. Rap music has inherited this seriality of produced identity from twentieth century icons of the singer/songwriter and its display of the public rivate self—in reverse order from grunge to punk, from folk to blues.Finally, it is worthwhile to think of online culture in similar ways in the production of public personas. Seriality is elemental to online culture. Social media encourage the production of public identities through forms of repetition of that identity. In order to establish a public profile, social media users establish an identity with some consistency over time. The everydayness in the production of the public self online thus resembles the production and performance of seriality in fiction. Professional social media sites such as LinkedIn encourage the consistency of public identity and this is very important in understanding the new versions of the public self that are deployed in contemporary culture. However, much like the new psychological depth that is part of the meaning of serial characters such as Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Slim Shady in Eminem, or Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, social media seriality also encourages greater revelations of the private self via Instagram and Facebook walls and images. We are collectively reconstituted as personas online, seriated by the continuing presence of our online sites and regularly drawn to reveal more and greater depths of our character. In other words, the online persona resembles the new depth of the quality television serial personnage with elaborate arcs and great complexity. Seriality in our public identity is also uncovered in the production of our game avatars where, in order to develop trust and connection to friends in online settings, we maintain our identity and our patterns of gameplay. At the core of this online identity is a desire for visibility, and we are drawn to be “picked up” and shared in some repeatable form across what we each perceive as a meaningful dimension of culture. Through the circulation of viral images, texts, and videos we engage in a circulation and repetition of meaning that feeds back into the constancy and value of an online identity. Through memes we replicate and seriate content that at some level seriates personas in terms of humour, connection and value.Seriality is central to understanding the formation of our masks of public identity and is at least one valuable analytical way to understand the development of the contemporary persona. This essay represents the first foray in thinking through the relationship between seriality and persona.ReferencesBarbour, Kim, and P. David Marshall. “The Academic Online Constructing Persona.” First Monday 17.9 (2012).Browne, Nick. “The Political Economy of the (Super)Text.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.3 (1984): 174-82. Cavell, Stanley. “Reflections on the Ontology of Film.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Wojcik and Pamela Robertson. London: Routledge, 2004 (1979). 29-35.Dawkins, Marcia Alesan. “Close to the Edge: Representational Tactics of Eminem.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43.3 (2010): 463-85.De Kosnik, Abigail. “One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling.” How to Watch Television. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 355-63.Denson, Shane, and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann. “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games.” Journal of Computer Game Culture 7.1 (2013): 1-32.Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Flash Gordon and the 1930s and 40s Science Fiction Serial.” Screening the Past 11 (2011). 20 May 2014.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1973.Hagedorn, Roger “Technology and Economic Exploitation: The Serial as a Form of Narrative Presentation.” Wide Angle 10. 4 (1988): 4-12.Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.Heinrich, Nathalie. “Personne, Personnage, Personalité: L'acteur a L'ère De Sa Reproductibilité Technique.” Personne/Personnage. Eds. Thierry Lenain and Aline Wiame. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2011. 77-101.Jauss, Hans Robert, and Paul De Man. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Brighton: Harvester, 1982.Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.Jung, C. G., et al. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.Kracauer, Siegfried. “Remarks on the Actor.” Movie Acting, the Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004 (1960). 19-27.Leonard Nimoy & Pharrell Williams: Star Trek & Creating Spock. Ep. 12. Reserve Channel. December 2013. Lenain, Thierry, and Aline Wiame (eds.). Personne/Personnage. Librairie Philosophiques J. VRIN, 2011.Lotz, Amanda D. “House: Narrative Complexity.” How to Watch TV. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 22-29.Marshall, P. David. “The Cate Blanchett Persona and the Allure of the Oscar.” The Conversation (2014). 4 April 2014.Marshall, P. David “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-70.Marshall, P. David. “Personifying Agency: The Public–Persona–Place–Issue Continuum.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-71.Marshall, P. David. “The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of Presentational Media.” Celebrity Studies 1.1 (2010): 35-48.Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. 2nd Ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. London: Faber and Faber, 2013.Mayer, R. “Image Power: Seriality, Iconicity and the Mask of Fu Manchu.” Screen 53.4 (2012): 398-417.Nayar, Pramod K. Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society, and Celebrity Culture. New Delhi Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2009.Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Not Spock. Milbrae, California: Celestial Arts, 1975.Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Spock. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 1995.Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.Stanislavski, Constantin. Creating a Role. New York: Routledge, 1989 (1961).Thompson, John O. “Screen Acting and the Commutation Test.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004 (1978). 37-48.Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. London New York: Routledge, 1995.Vineberg, Steve. Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style. New York Toronto: Schirmer Books, 1991.Wills, Garry. John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity. 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Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Date: 15-08-2014
Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
Date: 07-1998
DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.1696
Abstract: A friend of mine once tried to capture the feeling that one gets from a new thing. He decided that there was no word to describe the sensation of having an unblemished eraser when you were in primary school, but nevertheless it produced a kind of fascinating awe in the apparent perfection of the new. A similar feeling captures the new car owner in smelling the interior's recently minted plastic. Used car dealers would doubtless love to bottle that smell because it produces the momentary pleasure of new ownership. And I am sure there are certain people who are addicted to that smell, and go test drive new cars with no intention of buying just for the experience of the "new" smell. New clothes produce that same sensation: most of us ignore the label which says "wash before wearing" because we want to experience the incredible stiff tactile sensation of a new shirt. My friend called this gle-gle, and it is a pervasive relationship to New in a variety of guises. New implies two kinds of objects or practices: it implies either the replacement of the old or it points to the emergence of something that has not existed before. In both cases, new always heralds change and has the potential for social or cultural transformation. As a result, popular writers and ad copy editors often link new with revolution. For ex le, the advent of the computer was seen to be revolutionary. Similarly a new detergent which worked in cold water promised cataclysmic change in the 1960s. But these promises of revolution through some innovation have not necessarily led to massive social upheaval rather they have identified a discursive trope of contemporary culture which links new with rejuvenation. The claim that something is new is the mantra of modernity and the kitsch of the postmodern. This double-play of the concept of the new is best untangled through thinking how a once new object becomes the contemporary way of expressing the former hope of progress and change -- with raised and knowing eyebrow. I recently stumbled into one of these double-plays. While searching for bedding for yet another birthday slumber party, I picked up an old mattress which still had its 1950s label, where it proudly announced that the cushioning was the wonderful new revolutionary foam system called the Dunlopillo. The Dunlopillo system was certainly trademarked and no doubt patented for its then unique system of troughs and cones of army green foam but in its current incarnation the foam was weak and the bed easily crumpled in half. All that was left of the sentiment of newness was the label, which in its graphics expressed the necessary connection to science as the future, and authoritative zeal in its seriousness of its revolutionary potential. But seen from 1998, the claims seemed bombastic and beautifully optimistic. Modernity's relationship to the new is to celebrate the potential for change. It is a cultural project that has enveloped the sentiments of capitalism and socialism from their origins in the 18th and 19th centuries, and manifested itself in what Schudson labelled "capitalist realism" in advertising, and what is known as socialist realism as a state-sanctioned artistic movement in the Soviet Union. Both representations provided their systems with the capacity to repaint the cultural canvas with each new product such as Dunlopillo, or in the Soviet system with each new five-year productivity plan for the collective. Maintaining the unity of the cultural project was a challenge to each system's representational regime sustaining the power of the new as a revolutionary force is the fundamental link between capitalist and socialist systems throughout the twentieth century. These representational regimes were in fact connected to the production of new phenomena, new materials, new social formations. However, the message of the new has gradually weakened over the last thirty years. Think of the way in which the Space Race produced all sorts of new technologies of computing, calculation and the integration of electronics into the running of the automobile. It also produced the breakfast orange-juice substitute, 'Tang'. Indeed, the first advertisements for Tang intoned that it was the drink that astronauts enjoyed in space. Tang and its flavour crystals provided the ultimate form of efficiency and convenience, and provided a clear link between the highly ideologically driven space program and the everyday lives of citizens of the "free" world. In the 60s and 70s the link between the general project of modernity and improving everyday life was made evidently clear every time you added water to your Tang flavour crystals. One has to ask: where is Tang today? Not only is it difficult to find in my supermarket, but even if it were available it would not operate as the same representation of progress and the project of modernity. Instead, it would have little more than a nostalgic -- or, kitsch -- hold on a generation that has seen too many representations of the new and too many attempts at indicating improvement. The decay of the cultural power of the new is clearly linked to consumer culture's dependence on and overuse of the concept. The entire century has been enveloped by an accelerating pattern of symbolic change. Symbolic change is not necessarily the same as the futurologist Toffler claiming that we are in a constant state of "future shock" rather it is much more the introduction of new designs as if there were not only transformed designs, but fundamentally transformed products. This perpetually 'new' is a feature of the fashion industry as it works toward seasonal transformation. Toothbrushes have also been the object of this design therapy, which produces both continual change over the last twenty years, and claims of new revolutionary designs. Central to this notion of symbolic change is advertising. Advertising plays with the hopes and desires of its audience by providing the contradictory symbolic materiality of progressive change. The cultural and political power of the new is the symbolic terrain that advertising has mined to present its "images of well-being". What one can now detect in the circulation of advertising is at least two responses to the decay of the power of the new. First, instead of advertising invoking the wonders of science and its technological offspring providing you with something revolutionary, advertising has moved increasingly towards personal transformation, echoing the 30-year-old self-help, self-discovery book industry. In Australia, GM-Holden's Barina television ads provide a typical ex le. No technical detail about the car is given in the ads, but a great deal of information --- via the singing, the superimposed dancers, and the graphics employed -- signifies that the car is designed for the young female driver. Symbolically, the car is transformed into a new space of feminine subjectivity. Second, advertising plays with the cynicism of the cognoscenti. If the new itself can no longer work to signify genuine change and improvement in contemporary culture, it is instead represented as a changed attitude to the contemporary world that only a particular demographic will actually comprehend. The level of sophistication in reading the new as a cultural phenomenon by advertisers (or by proxy, their agencies) is sometimes astounding. A recent Coca-Cola radio ad played with a singing style of ennui and anger that embodied punk, but only as punk has been reinvented in the mid-90s through such groups as Green Day. The lyrics were identical to the rest of the "Always Coca-Cola" c aign that has been circulating internationally for the last five years however, the cynicism of the singers, the bare tunefulness, and even the use of a popular culture icon such as Coke as the object of a song (and ridicule), tries to capture a particular new cultural moment with a different audience. Advertising as a cultural discourse on its own expresses a malaise within the transforming promise of the new that has been so much a part of modernity. However, the myths of modernity -- its clear association with social progress -- have never completely dissipated. In contemporary culture, it has fallen on new computer technologies to keep the ember of modernity and progress glowing. Over the last two decades the personal computer has maintained the naiveté of the new that was central to mid-twentieth century advertising, if not post-war culture in general. Very much like the Space Race stitched together an ideological weave that connected the populace to the interests of what Eisenhower first described as a military-industrial complex, the computer has ignited a new generation of optimism. It has been appropriated by governments from Singapore and Malaysia (think of the Multimedia Super Corridor) to the United States (think of Vice President Al Gore's NII) as the rescue package for the organisation of capitalism. Through Microsoft's hegemony there is a sense of coherence in "operating systems" which makes their slogan "where do you want to go today?", in its evocation of choice, also an invocation of unity of purpose. The wonderful synergy of the personal computer is that it weaves the conception of personal desire back into a generalisable social system of value. Despite all these efforts at harnessing the new computer technologies into established political and economic forces, the new nature of computer technology draws us back to the reason why new is intrinsically exciting: the defining nature of the new is that it offers the potential for some form of social change. The Internet has been the source for this new discourse of utopia. If we follow Howard Rheingold's logic, New "virtual communities" are formed online. A disequilibrium in who controls the flow of information is part of the appeal of the Internet, and the very appearance of this journal stems from that sense of new access. The Internet is said to challenge the boundaries of nations and states (although English language hegemony and pure economic access continue to operate to control the flow of those boundaries), with regulation devolving out of state policy towards the in idual. Transforming identities are also very much an element of online communities: if nothing else, the play of gender in online game and chat programs identifies the constructed nature of our identities. All of this energy, and what I would call affect, refers to how computer technology and the Internet have managed to produce a sensation of agency. What I mean by agency is not necessarily attached to the project of modernity rather it is the sense of being able to produce the new itself, as opposed to just living in the architecture of the new provided by someone else. On one level, the Internet and personal computers do provide a way to make your information look as if it is more significant and of a higher quality. The continuing proliferation of personal websites attests to this narcissistic drive of contemporary culture. On another level, the narcissism also identifies activity and agency in engaging in a form of communication with others. The Internet then can be thought of as paralleling movements in contemporary music, where the ability to construct soundscapes through computer interfaces has given the musician greater agency in the production of new electronic music. The new is intrinsically an odd phenomenon. It continually threatens established patterns. What is different about the new and its meaning in the twentieth century is that it has become part of the central ideology of western culture in its characterised representation of modernity. In a strange mix, the new reinforces the old and established. Nonetheless, the new, like culture itself, is never completely contained by any overarching architecture. The new expresses the potential, and occasionally the enactment, of significant cultural change. The fatigue that I have identified in our thinking about the new identifies a decline in the power of modernity to capture change, difference and transformation. That very fatigue may indicate in and of itself something profoundly new. References Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Schudson, Michael. Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. London: Pan Books, 1971. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall. "Thinking through New." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.1 (1998). [your date of access] www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/think.php . Chicago style: P. David Marshall, "Thinking through New," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 1 (1998), www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/think.php ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall. (1998) Thinking through new. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(1). www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/think.php ([your date of access]).
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-1998
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X9808600108
Abstract: For a variety of reasons, the traditional popular or ‘mass’ media have attempted to position themselves on the Internet through the establishment of often elaborate Websites, The potential future delivery of film, television and radio through the Internet represents a serious challenge to the continued viability of media companies and their vested modes of delivery and exhibition. Their Internet sites represent their reaction to a possible computer/media converged future. At present, these sites play with the different interactive aesthetics of the Internet and tend to emphasise the use of the Internet as primarily a promotional tool. This article analyses the Websites of selected national and international media corporations, identifies the promotional quality of their presence, and charts their organisation of desire.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-06-2008
DOI: 10.1002/9781405186407.WBIECC011
Abstract: Celebrity journalists are news workers who become prominent or famous in their own right and thus objects of media attention. Journalists are a means of chronicling fame and infamy, and stars and leaders depend on journalism to maintain a public profile. Under economic pressures, media industries have tended to associate public personalities with their chroniclers. Repeated contact with the renowned has led journalists to become closely identified with those whose stories they report, resulting in their being elevated to celebrity status themselves and joining the A‐list of popular culture celebrities from film, television, and music (→ Popular Culture and the News Media).
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Date: 12-2020
Publisher: Deakin University
Date: 05-11-2018
DOI: 10.21153/PSJ2018VOL4NO2ART757
Abstract: The present work interrogates Al Gore’s persona as a climate change activist with reference to a process we describe with the neologism “personafication”: the act of constructing resenting a public persona in order to cultivate impressions that enable public figures to consolidate authoritative reputations. The formation of such a commanding persona requires the circulation of three forms of symbolic capital: cultural, celebrity, and reputational capital as well as the performance of overtly theatrical strategies calculated to establish an empathetic relationship between performer and audience. In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore released the award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. This film subsequently functioned as a catalyst for various forms of climate change activism. This paper unpacks the contradictory ideological and cultural work performed by the film with reference to what we describe as un geste suffit that is, those gestures that merely perform in idual agency in order to connect the formulation of personal ethical identity to communal forms of political activism like environmentalism. Through a close reading of the presentation of Gore’s persona in the film itself, and research which tracks the reception and political efficacy of the film, the paper contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the politics of environmental/scientific communication. Finally, we locate our reading of Gore’s film within a contemporary context by making reference to the way An Inconvenient Truth is both resistant to and complicit with the environmental policies of the Trump administration.
Publisher: University of Illinois Libraries
Date: 18-08-2012
DOI: 10.5210/FM.V0I0.3969
Abstract: This paper explores the way in iduals 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 in idual/career value. Five distinct types of academic persona are explored primarily through academics working in digital communication areas through these cases and ex les this new communication environment is explored. This paper concludes that institutions and in iduals need to develop in the most pragmatic sense, online academic persona and ensure that these online ‘selfs’ are connected with authenticity to the professional work of the academic.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-1997
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2015
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
Publisher: Project MUSE
Date: 1999
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 19-09-2010
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2017
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Date: 15-08-2014
Publisher: Deakin University
Date: 11-07-2019
DOI: 10.21153/PSJ2019VOL5NO1ART856
Abstract: 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-fold. First, we want to provide a map of how persona has been employed in research in music. What this will generate is a critical investigation of these traditions, but also what we hope will be a valuable reference for future music and persona scholarship. Second, and of equal importance, is how these uses of musical persona can be further informed and assisted by the more recent scholarship in persona studies most openly articulated by this journal over the last five years, but also the widening array of related books, articles and book chapters that are percolating in connected fields. We attempt to pull together our review of the current field of music and persona with the urgent need to identify with greater thought and clarity the industrial structures that shape our relationship to music performance and its relation to audiences and its constitution of celebrated in iduals and recognizable and market-sensitive personas. Our essay concludes with the introduction of our series of articles in this issue and how they intersect with these various traditions that have explored persona’s imbrication into music.
Publisher: Deakin University
Date: 07-12-2016
DOI: 10.21153/PS2016VOL2NO2ART628
Abstract: 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 world. Nonetheless, its presence is expected, its strategic intentions acknowledged and negotiated.What is interesting is that persona—at least as it has been explored and defined in Persona Studies so far—always has a political dimension. It has been identified as a strategic identity, a form of negotiation of the in idual in their foray into a collective world of the social (Marshall and Barbour). Persona is a fabricated reconstruction of the in idual that is used to play a role that both helps the in idual navigate their presence and interactions with others and helps the collective to position the role of the in idual in the social. Persona is imbued with politics at its core.In this issue of Persona Studies, we explore political persona, a characterisation roiled in redundancy if our definitions above are adopted. The essays gathered in this collection debate these definitional affinities, and augment and nuance many other dimensions that help delineate what constitutes political persona. 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 we identify through some of the most prominent political personas—Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders in the United States’ 2016 Presidential c aign, for ex le—and through a study of a major political event—Brexit in 2016 in the U.K.—whether something has shifted and changed in these cultures?
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2022
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 16-03-2017
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Date: 31-12-2017
No related grants have been discovered for Philip David Marshall.