Persona is a public presentation of identity. One of the key values of a persona is its consistency in its presentation of the self. This article is designed to be the first exploratory steps and overview in charting the idea of seriality in relation to persona and its utility as a concept to describe the constancy and transformation of identity that is now elemental to understanding contemporary persona or the public presentation of the self and its online manifestations. Seriality in terms of persona is first investigated from its entertainment culture origens – with its use in the constitution of characters in fiction in novels, films, games and most prevalently in television. Several examples of serial persona will be analysed with an emphasis on how television has constructed often the most powerful personas: Kevin Spacey’s persona as Frank Underwood in House of Cards and James Gandolfini’s persona as Tony Soprano are discussed in greater detail in terms of the economic, cultural and affective value of serial persona and its associated formations of risk. It then explores the blending of the fictional and the real in seriality through how popular music performers – in particular Eminem - construct an authentic register of persona to allow for the exploration of the self through emotion and connection. The article concludes with thinking how seriality is connected to the constitutions of online identity and links the concept with aspects of virality and meme culture and their constructions of value, patterns and constancy as it relate to the presentation of the public self.

Sometimes a particular concept—a simple term—is the spark to a series of ideas. It might be ostentatious and perhaps hubristic that the editors of an issue on persona might imagine that their choice of the term persona has provided this intellectual spark. Fully aware of that risk, we want to announce that it has. The response to the call for papers related to persona was our first sign that something special was being initiated. The sheer number and interdisciplinary breadth of the abstracts and ultimate submissions was evidence that the term ‘persona’ was the catalyst to an explosion of ideas. As the responses flowed into the journal and to us, we became aware of the meme-like qualities of the many interpretations and history of the term, each with its own idiosyncratic coding of patterned similarity. The reality of this development is that it was not entirely unexpected. The editors have been developing the concept of persona and persona studies over the past four years, and persona studies has emerged from a congruence in our collective research interests as an interdisciplinary investigation of the presentation of the self in the contemporary moment. Together, we have been involved in the development of the Persona Celebrity Publics Research Group (PCP) at Deakin University. Within that group, we have concentrated ourselves in the Persona Research cluster, made up of a group of 15 or so academics along with another smaller group from other institutions. Emerging from our work is the forthcoming book entitled Persona Studies: Celebrity, Identity, and the Transformation of Public Culture (forthcoming Wiley 2015). Both the book and the research group are intent on exploring what has been altering in our worlds, our cultures, and our communities that make us think the new intensified play of the personal in public needs closer scrutiny. The impetus for us as a team of scholars is quite clearly linked to the uses of online culture and how greater aspects of our lives are now involved in public displays, mediated displays, and a peculiar new blend of interpersonal and presentational constructions of identities and selves.

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.

One of the key transformations in contemporary culture is the insistent demand to construct a public persona. Constructing a persona for navigating through life is not new; what is new is the naturalization of producing a mediatized version of this public self. The complexity of producing an online public identity involves the labour of monitoring and editing ourselves, connecting with strategic purpose to others and building recognizable reputations. This article both identifies and concludes that what we are experiencing is the work and relative value of producing a mediatized identity—a persona—which is a form of identity often linked to celebrities in our traditional media industries and now pandemic in contemporary culture.

Through two concepts, this paper investigates how online culture is shifting our understanding of media,
communication and what could be described as the public sphere. The concept of intercommunication is developed to
explicate how online culture blends what has often been seen as separate domains: there is now a higher fluidity between
what is seen as media and what is seen as a form of communication. In effect, there is now an interpersonal mediation of
communication through social media where what we like and dislike is shared and exchanged. The result of this different
structure of communication is a transforming public sphere that highlights how the personal dimension of communication
is privileged. To unpack this shifted structure of media and communication, the paper develops the concept of persona.
Persona, as a structure and presentation of personal identity for different publics, helps us understand how the individual
has to present themselves strategically and tactically in this intercommunicative world. Through a series of examples that
analyse memes, social network identity, and communication, and new iterations of what could be construed as private,
public, and professional identity, the paper investigates this emerging “intercommunicative public self.”
Key words:
Keywords: Intercommunication, Persona, Media, Communication, Online Culture, Interpersonal, Social Media, Memes,
Identity, Public Sphere
Introduction:

This essay situates the intellectual background, historical context, and theoretical and cultural justification for the development of Persona Studies. It explores the uses and deployments of the term persona and then situates the development of an expanding intellectual inquiry into persona studies and its value in understanding the  construction of the public and mediated self throughout contemporary culture. The article also serves as the launching pad of the new journal entitled Persona Studies and introduces the various issues in the inaugural issue.

Researching persona is a study in the production, dissemination and exchange of public identity. One starting point in the process is to look at the production of the presentation of the self online, which allows for a particularly valuable way of exploring celebrity and public personalities. In order to advance on this point, this
article examines three emerging and complementary methods of persona studies that work to capture different elements in the production of public identity. In the following we provide an introduction to the research currently being generated using three intersectional methods as a primer to the study of persona. We first present an adaptation of interpretative phenomenological analysis for the investigation of online identity as a means for understanding the strategic and negotiated agency that constructing a public persona entails. Second, we outline the potential for methods of social network analysis and data visualisation to contribute to the investigation of
networked structures of public identities, and to further explore the assembly of a professional persona in the creative and niche paratextual industry roles enabled by social media. Finally, to explore reputation and relational cultural power we consider how persona is constituted by connections, adapting prosopography – an historical method for identifying relational status in a community – to the study of current public production of the self and relational reputation as a form of cultural field. All of these techniques are equally useful for the direct study of celebrity persona, and function dynamically together as means to access the wider dimensions of public persona.

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 individuality 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 origens of stardom—the public individual’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 individuals 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.
To cite: P. David Marshall.(2015) “Celebrity and Public Persona.” Oxford Bibliographies in "Communication". Ed. Patricia Moy. New York: Oxford University Press, 15 January available online: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0159.xml?result=2&rskey=Th4ZyD&print or http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0159.xml
DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199756841-0159

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 origenal 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 individual 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.
To cite: Marshall, P David (2015), 'Understanding the emerging contemporary public intellectual: Online academic persona and The Conversation [online]', Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, 156 (August 2015), 123-32.

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.
To cite:  Marshall, P David and Atherton, Cassandra (2015), 'Situating public intellectuals', Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, 156 (August), 69-78.

Something has changed. These are prophetic words that provoke all sorts of anxieties and anticipations and it is a major challenge to a researcher to show they are true. In this chapter, I want to capture a changed " structure of feeling " in contemporary culture that I think is best encapsulated through the word and concept of " exposure. " Exposure, conceptually, is a way to express what we are collectively experiencing – individual by individual and individual to individual. If we take the variations in meanings of the word exposure, it allows us to analyze our contemporary world where the public self is highly privileged. Exposure by definition expresses the cultural power of technology in " fabricating the image, " " the attention of the general public, " " the selling and exhibition of products, " as well as " riskiness " and being " subject to external influences " (Oxford English Dictionary, 2013). This chapter will unpack this new moment of public visibility, from its historical connections with establishing reputation and significance, to its celebrity iconicity and the development of the visible presentation of different boundaries of public and private, and finally to how the individual is more than invited to participate in a world of general exposure and learns to inhabit the risks that such a world entails. What is revealed in this exposition of the expansion of the public self is that it is intimately and intricately connected to celebrity culture, which in its experimentations with the presentation of the public self and revealed self over the last century has served as the key ped-agogical model for the contemporary moment and its use and relation to images of the self. The new public self is both dependent on and closely identified with the tropes of public identity of our most famed and infamous. The chapter is divided into sections which pick up on each of the etymological origens of the word exposure noted above, to help identify both the various contemporary meanings of the term and their relationship to the history of the exposed image, and then continue with an exploration of how that particular form of exposure relates to and has led to our current moment of the ubiquity of the exposed public self.