Before Facebook, Twitter, and most of the digital media platforms that now form routine parts of our online lives, Jay Bolter (2000) anticipated that online activities would reshape how we understand and produce identity: a 'networked self', he noted, 'is displacing Cartesian printed self as a cultural paradigm ' (2000, p. 26). The twenty-first century has not only produced a proliferation and mass popularisation of platforms for the production of public digital identities, but also an explosion of scholarship investigating the relationship between such identities and technology. These approaches have mainly focussed on the relations between humans and their networks of other human connections, often neglecting the broader implications of what personas are and might be, and ignoring the rise of the non-human as part of social networks. In this introductory essay, we seek to both trace the work done so far to explore subjectivity and the public presentation of the self via networked technologies, and contribute to these expanding accounts by providing a brief overview of what we consider to be five important dimensions of an online persona. In the following, we identify and explicate the five dimensions of persona as public, mediatised, performative, collective and having intentional value and, while we acknowledge that these dimensions are not exhaustive or complete, they are certainly primary.
KEY NODES OF RESEARCHThe scope of research in this field is wide and varied, fruitfully informed by multiple disciplinary perspectives. Here we trace only a handful of scholars and concepts, focusing in particular on work that is foundational or influential in our formulations of the dimensions of online persona. Harrison Rainie and Barry Wellman (2012), for example, advance the notion of 'networked individualism', which helps to acknowledge and account for the connections between online activity and the formation of subjectivity. They remind us that communication technologies, media platforms, and digital services are not isolated objects or discrete entities, but are voraciously incorporated into the lives of individuals as part of the extant identity assemblage that is undergoing continuous revision, updates, and patching as we form connections and exchange information with other people and other systems. Zizi Papacharissi's (2010) media and communication perspective presents us with another elaboration of the 'networked self', a term which she uses to indicate the construction of a subjective performance across multiple and simultaneous streams of social awareness that expands autonomy, potentially reduces agency, and which requires constant self-surveillance and monitoring.
