[ecrea] Call for Abstracts for *The Media Persona in Digital Media Culture* International Research Seminar

CFP: 
http://mcc.ku.dk/research/focus-areas/fitt/arrangementer/the-media-persona-in-digital-media-culture/


The Media Persona in Digital Media Culture

International Research-seminar May 9th. 2018 University of Copenhagen

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Professor David Marshall Deakin University, 
Melbourne, Australia


Call for abstracts:
DEADLINE: March 1st, 2018: 250-300 words for paper presentations. 
Abstracts should be submitted to (h.k.haastrup /at/ hum.ku.dk) and 
(moestrup /at/ hum.ku.dk)

One striking transformation in contemporary media culture is how 
individual self- presentations have become increasingly public and 
ubiquitous. We all make our mediated selves public in numerous ways both 
online and offline as part of our everyday life. Lately the ‘media 
persona’ has been re-introduced as a key concept in contemporary media 
culture notably by P. David Marshall (2015) as a way of understanding 
the changing relationship between public and private and to understand 
public identity as a strategic force in the attention economy. The media 
persona - especially within the media industry – is currently 
challenging established traditions of public performance and factual 
media genres: Professional journalists from legacy media report news 
with a personal/subjective voice, they engage in confessional journalism 
and use social media for self-promotion; ordinary citizens display their 
public/private selves, including personal tastes and predilections, on 
vlogs and blogs, to gain a public voice and recognition among peer 
followers; celebrities manage their corporate brand online when 
promoting their philanthropies as well as their most recent 
film/book/album; and even public intellectuals/academics use digital 
media platforms to perform their societal critique and promote their 
public image as intellectuals.
Research on ‘the media persona’ has been done in many different fields – 
primarily within film and media studies, including media and 
sociology/psychology (Horton and Wohl 1956, Goffman 1956, Meyrowitz 
1985), film studies (Dyer 1979, King 2015), critical theory (Lowenthal 
1944), studies of political communication (Corner & Pels 2003), studies 
of social media and self-presentation (Senft 2008, Marwick and boyd 
2011), celebrity studies (Rojek 2001, Turner 2004, Wheeler 2013) and 
performance studies (Auslander 2015). Finally, persona studies have 
recently been proposed as a new, specific but interdisciplinary research 
field (Marshall 2010, 2013, 2015, Moore, Barbour and Lee 2017).
This research seminar invites scholars from all these research areas 
with the aim of furthering the study of the media persona by discussing 
theoretical and analytical frameworks as well as methodological 
approaches that can make us better understand the implications of the 
ubiquitous individual, both public and private, self-presentations in 
contemporary, digital media culture.

We invite abstracts on the following topics (though not limited to these 
issues):


* How media personas operate within different fields of culture: 
literature, music, film, etc. * Amateur and professional media persona’s 
and the attention economy
* The challenges of the media persona to factual genres
* The challenges of media persona to professional categories such as 
‘the journalist’

* Media personas and the TV/radio-presenter
* Media personas and the para-social
* The media persona as a strategy on social media
* The intellectual/scientist as media persona
* Distinctions/overlaps between celebrities and media personas
* The relationship between the media persona and institutional affiliations
* Theoretical frameworks with which we can conceptualize and grasp the 
notion of the media persona
* Analyses of specific media personas in contemporary media culture
* Methodological approaches to the study of the media persona


Practical information: It is possible to participate as a presenter or 
if you register as a participant (no later than March 31st), please 
contact (h.k.haastrup /at/ hum.ku.dk) and (moestrup /at/ hum.ku.dk). Please be advised 
that there is limited room for participants. However there is no 
registration fee and coffee and lunch during the research seminar is 
included for presenters and registered participants.

Acceptance/decline notices will be distributed by the end of March 2018.

Keynote presentation: P. David Marshall: “The Registers of Contemporary 
Persona: Affect, Emotion, Intimacy, Gesture and the cultural 
implications of the Pandemic Mediatized Self”

The public presentation of the self – what can be called “persona” - is 
a complex and unstable strategy and performance that is deployed by the 
individual to inhabit a collective world. In the contemporary moment 
with the exigencies of online culture and its forms of communication, 
persona is pandemic: in other words, through social media predominantly 
but also through other platforms and applications, we are all inhabiting 
a mediatized version of ourselves for much of our daily lives.

This presentation focuses on the registers of communication that are 
being privileged and enacted in online culture through our constructions 
of personas. It identifies a shift in public communication where the 
deployment of at least a greater revelation of the self is enacted 
through more emotional and affective registers. Some of this 
transformation can be read and examined as the migration of 
interpersonal communication into social and mediatized settings and 
exchanges which has allowed our messages to be interspersed with what 
may have been perceived as more private and even intimate registers.

The presentation will explore this through the normalization of a 
different emotional registers in online culture. On Twitter and 
Facebook, we page2image710469840when we “like” a particular post and we 
engage in “sharing” our likes. Through acronyms and hashtags we connect 
to others through a structure of affective bonding. Indeed, on a social 
media platform such as Instagram, failing to page2image710489104a photo 
produces negative emotions of not caring and not being engaged. Trends 
via social media and its permutations into legacy media are often the 
amassing of sentiment and sharing engagement. The presentation will 
investigate the new comfortability of emotion – and emoji use as one 
example – that establishes this shifted public culture. It will conclude 
with speculation around how this prevalent emotive persona culture has 
been a significant factor in the destabilization of information and news 
in contemporary culture as we privilege feeling over something as 
neutral as fact in a transformed public/political culture transnationally.

page2image710539808 page2image710540080

BIO: P. David Marshall holds a Professorship and Personal Chair in New 
Media, Communication and Cultural Studies at Deakin University in 
Melbourne Australia. He is the world-leading scholar in the study of 
celebrity and public personality systems. Along with many articles and 
book chapters, Professor Marshall’s books include Celebrity and Power 
(Minnesota, 2nd edition 2014), Celebrity Persona Pandemic (Minnesota, 
2016), New Media Cultures (Oxford Arnold, 2004), Web Theory (2003) and 
Fame Games (Cambridge, 2000). His edited or co-edited books include A 
Companion to Celebrity (Blackwell-Wiley, 2016), Contemporary Publics 
(Palgrave, 2016), and The Celebrity Culture Reader (Routledge, 2006). 
His current research has focussed on the concept of persona and the now 
associated sub-field of Persona Studies which investigates the strategic 
construction of the public display of the self, both in its online forms 
and in other transforming contexts. His forthcoming research and 
publications include: the General Editor of the 6-volume Cultural 
History of Fame (for Bloomsbury Academic), the co-authored Advertising 
and Promotional Cultures: Case Histories (Palgrave, Jan. 2018) and 
Persona Studies: Celebrity, Identity and the Transformation of the 
Public Self (June 2018). His expertise has led to interviews published 
in the New York Times, Globe and Mail, Sydney Morning Herald as well as 
appearances on other legacy media including the BBC, CNN, Fox News, the 
ABC and many other media outlets around the world. He maintains a very 
intermittent personal blog at www.pdavidmarshall.com

The seminar is organized by Helle Kannik Haastrup and Steffen Damkjær 
Moestrup as part of the Research Project: From Ivory Tower to Twitter: 
Rethinking the Cultural Critic in Contemporary Media Culture (2015-19), 
funded by the Danish Research Council for Independent Research: Culture 
and Communication, lead by Associate Professor Nete Nørgaard Kristensen.

Official project website: http://mcc.ku.dk/research/focus-areas/fitt/


LINK to CFP: 
http://mcc.ku.dk/research/focus-areas/fitt/arrangementer/the-media-persona-in-digital-media-culture/




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