2017 Keynote – David Marshall

Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies (CMCS)
5th International Conference

Bridging Gaps: Where is the Critic in Television Journalism?

CUNY School of Journalism
New York City, USA
August 31 – September 1, 2017

Day 2 Conference Keynote Speaker

Professor P. David Marshall

Pandemic Mediatized Identity: Professional Personas as Public Intellectuals in the social media and “presentational media” era

One of the most major transformations in contemporary culture is the mediatization of the self. Across an array of social media platforms – from Twitter and Facebook to Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest and YouTube (and this list could be extended to games use and even fitness sharing) – we have had a proliferation of ways and means to present oneself publicly. This pandemic change is having repercussions across the social (Marshall, 2016), political (Marshall and Henderson, 2016) and cultural world (Marshall, 2015b) as a presentational media and cultural regime continues to be on ascendance.  This new regime is replacing what I have called the representational media and cultural regime – which identifies the incomplete breakdown and transformation of what could be described as legacy media.

One of the implications of this change is the way that expertise moves through this presentationally-oriented media culture. After developing the foundations of this presentational media era, this presentation will explore how different professionals engage in presenting themselves online with some discussion/data on the public presentation of the self and knowledge by lawyers, doctors and the current generation of academics on Twitter specifically.  It will discuss how the public intellectual (Atherton and Marshall, 2015; Marshall, 2015a) is differently constituted in this era: in some ways, expertise is still rewarded through appearances on legacy media, but, like YouTube celebrities, it is now partially dependent on a continuing connection to an audience of followers, sharers, and “friends” that reshape the movement of information. The paper concludes with identifying how this different flow of expertise is connected to our current moment of political and information turbulence.

Bio:

Professor Marshall, a research professor and holding a personal chair in new media, communication and cultural studies at Deakin University, has published widely in two areas: the public personality/celebrity and new media culture. His books include Contemporary Publics (Palgrave, 2016), Celebrity Persona Pandemic (Minnesota, Forerunner Series, 2016), A Companion to Celebrity (Blackwell Wiley 2016), Celebrity and Power (1997; second edition, 2014), Fame Games (2000), Web Theory (2003), New Media Cultures (2004), and The Celebrity Culture Reader (2006). He has been a keynote speaker at many international conferences as well as interviewed for articles and many broadcast media programs from CNN, Fox News, BBC, and the ABC/Radio National to the Sydney Morning Herald, New York Times and the Toronto Star. His previous academic positions have been at Northeastern University in Boston, the University of Queensland in Brisbane, and Carleton University in Ottawa along with visiting positions at New York University, York University and Karlstad University. He is also Visiting Distinguished Foreign Expert in the School of Journalism and Communication at Central China Normal University (CCNU) in Wuhan China.

His current writing and research has focused on some key areas in contemporary popular culture: he has been developing the idea of ‘persona studies’, where the presentation of the public self has expanded well beyond celebrity culture via particularly online forms: it now structures and patterns reputation and value across many professions and through many recreational and leisure pursuits. He has developed three related concepts to help explore this change in contemporary culture: presentational media, the intercommunication industry, and the personalization complex. Forthcoming books include: Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories (Palgrave, 2016), and Persona Studies: Celebrity, Identity and the transformation of the public self (Wiley). He is also the founder of the Persona Studies Journal and M/C as well as the Persona Celebrity Publics Research Group (PCP) and a member of the Motion.Lab-Centre for Creative Arts Research (ML-CCAR). His personal blog can be found at: www.pdavidmarshall.com

Keynote References:

Marshall, P. David. (2016) The Celebrity Persona Pandemic. University of Minnesota Press, Forerunner series, 2016.

Marshall, P. David and Neil Henderson, (2016) “Political Persona 2016: An Introduction”. Persona Studies 2:2. December Online: https://ojs.deakin.edu.au/index.php/ps/issue/view/98/showToc  Special Issue on Political Persona.

Marshall, P. David (2015a) “Monitoring Persona: mediatized identity and the edited public self”, Frame: Journal of Literary Studies. 28.1 May 2015: 115-133.

Marshall, P. David and Cassandra Atherton. (2015) “Situating public intellectuals”. [online]. Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, No. 156, Aug 2015: 69-78. Availability: http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=463797418003587;res=IELLCC ISSN: 1329-878X.

Marshall, P. David, (2015b)Understanding the emerging contemporary public intellectual: Online academic persona and The Conversation [online]”. Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, No. 156, Aug 2015: 123-132. Availability: http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=464412306055108;res=IELLCC ISSN: 1329-878X.