Last year, our book Persona Studies: An Introduction was finally published. Along with my co-authors, Kim Barbour and Chris Moore, I was so pleased with what we had achieved. This work defines the emergence of an important field of study. Its investigation of how we curate our presentation of our public identity helps us understand the new constellations of our "comportment" of our selves in online culture.
The publishers, Wiley Blackwell, were also incredibly wonderful at capturing our cover image: these kinds of images are designed to embody (an interesting word that I have used extensively in previous research...) the book. As you can see, we wanted to link through an almost monumental/ancient face that public displays of the self is a part of the human condition and has many historical precedents. Equally - as you can see in the left hand side of the image - we wanted to identify in this work the quite complex transformation of our persona as we move collectively and pandemically into and through online culture. The screen and the pointing finger of a hand capture our strategies of reconstruction on social media platforms: in our texting, in our liking, in our meme-enhancing/sharing we negotiate a version of ourselves. It also captures the transformation - algorithmic, monitoring, sensing - that the "intercommunication industries" of online culture work very hard at producing and fabricating.
Perhaps the key insight in our research on persona is this: persona is neither collective nor individual but the way in which the individual negotiates their move into a collective spaces. The collective spaces of online culture are new: but they are partially informed from this historical path of negotiation that defines the human condition.
We explore the theoretical dimensions of persona studies and then map them into case studies. And one of the positive features of the book is its development of concepts and keywords for scholars to expand on this and move it even further.

There is much more to report about persona studies, but I will stop with a new meme that I am working on developing - public personality systems. I will get into that more in the coming weeks and how it might be interesting and a way to piece our expanding international research in persona studies even further....