The Media Persona in Digital Media Culture

International Research Seminar. The seminar is open to registered participants only  - deadline for registration is 23 April.

Programme

09:15 – 09:30  Words of welcome
                           Helle Kannik Haastrup & Steffen Moestrup (University of Copenhagen)

09:30 – 11:00  Keynote by P. David Marshall (Deakin University)
                          The Registers of Contemporary Persona: Affect, Emotion, Intimacy,
                          Gesture and the cultural implications of the Pandemic Mediatized Self
                           Please see abstract below

11:00 – 11:15  Coffee break

11:15 – 12:15  Panel 1: Transforming the Media Persona in Contemporary Media Culture

  • Lene Bull Christiansen (Roskilde University)
    any.body_co: Building co-branded activist personas online
  • Anne Jerslev (University of Copenhagen)
    Winona Ryder and the return to fame – saved by the body’s ageing

12:15 – 13:00  Lunch

13:00 – 15:00  Panel 2: Performing Media Personas in Culture & Politics

  • Helle Kannik Haastrup (University of Copenhagen)
    Reading with Emma Watson on Instagram: Strategies of Self-presentation and The Feminist Book Club Our Shared Shelf
  • Loes van Driel (University of Rotterdam)
    Selling brands while staying ‘authentic’: Instagram Influencers’ Construction of an Online Persona in the New Media Landscape
  • Milica Vučković (University of Zagreb)
    Pathos vs. Logos in online political communication: longitudinal comparative analysis of Obama’s and Cameron’s Facebook posts

15:00 – 15:30  Coffee break

15:30 – 16:30  Panel 3: Media Personas, Culture and Journalism

  • Steffen Moestrup (University of Copenhagen)
    Elegant Champagne, Vintage Jaguar and a few, Lovely Women: a performance analysis of persona-driven cultural journalism
  • Christine Isager (University of Copenhagen)
    The Media Persona at His Annual Performance Review: Irony in the Name of Integrity at Danish Radio24Syv

Please note  The seminar is exclusively open to registered participants (including presenters).

Application deadline is April 23rd to Steffen Moestrup or Helle Kannik Haastrup.

Practicalities

Coffee and tea as well as lunch will be offered to all registered participant.

Presentations

Each delegate has a maximum of 20 minutes for their presentation (and please bring your presentation on a memory stick as well so we can upload your power point presentation). After the presentations in each panel there will be a joint discussion.

Location

University of Copenhagen: The Seminar is in Building 27 on the ground floor room number 27.0.47.

General information to the University of Copenhagen.

Travel information about Copenhagen

Organisers

The research seminar is organised by Helle Haastrup and Steffen Moestrup as part of the research project “From Ivory Tower to Twitter (FITT): Rethinking the Cultural Critic in Contemporary Media Culture, funded by the Danish Research Council for Independent Research (2015-19)”. More info

Keynote Presentation

by P. David Marshall: “The Media Persona in Digital Media Culture” The Registers of Contemporary Persona: Affect, Emotion, Intimacy, Gesture and the cultural implications of the Pandemic Mediatized Self

Abstract

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   when 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   a 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.