The promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as marker of presentational media

Abstract

This article explores how the celebrity discourse of the self both presages and works as a pedagogical tool for the burgeoning world of presentational media and its users that is now an elemental part of new media culture. What is often understood as social media via social network sites is also a form of presentation of the self and produces this new hybrid among the personal, interpersonal and the mediated – what I am calling ‘presentational media’. Via Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and Twitter individuals engage in an expression of the self that, like the celebrity discourse of the self, is not entirely interpersonal in nature nor is it entirely highly mediated or representational. This middle ground of self-expression – again partially mediated and partially interpersonal (and theoretically drawing from Erving Goffman's work) – has produced an expansion of the intertextual zone that has been the bedrock of the celebrity industry for more than half a century and now is the very centre of the social media networks of the internet and mobile media. The article investigates this convergence of presentation of the self through a study of social network patterns of presentation of celebrities and the very overcoded similarity in the patterns of self-presentation of millions of users. It relates these forms of presentation to the longer discourse of the self that informed the production of celebrity for most of the last century.