Дэвид Маршалл. Продвижение и предъявление себя: селебрити как символ презентационных медиа

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 it produces a new hybrid of the personal, interpersonal and the mediated — what I call “presentational media.” Via Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Friendster, individuals engage in the 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. The middle ground of the self-expression described here (again, partially medi- ated, and partially interpersonal) has produced an expansion of the intertextual zone that has been the bedrock of the celebrity industry for more than half a century, and that has now become the core of social media networks. The article investigates this convergence of presentation of the self through a study of celebrities’ self-presen- tation on social networks and their similarities with patterns of self-presentation among millions of other users. The article relates these forms of presentation to the greater discourses of the self that have informed the production of the celebrity for most of the last century.