Understanding Comparative Communication through the Lens of Comparative Persona

Comparative studies and research have emerged in a variety of disciplines and over many centuries. In the history of science, one can see something called comparative anatomy emerging as a significant direction of research. The discipline of comparative literature, an area that has played with dimensions of nationalism, aestheticism and a more general study of the production of written forms, represents one of the longer objects of investigation that has informed comparative communication. This paper begins with tracing the intellectual origins of the idea of comparison and how it became an emerging element in the study of communication over the last 50 years. Its objective then is to work out how a focus on comparative public identities – what will be identified as comparative personas specifically – can inform comparative communication research. The paper concludes with a study of the particular dimensions of online comparative persona and how a new generation of comparative communication research can be advanced from this perspective.