Registers of performance: negotiating the professional, personal and intimate in online persona creation

Abstract

As the online persona becomes ever more ubiquitous, those who create them must negotiate increasingly diverse audiences. I define an online persona as the presentation of the self on and through digitally networked spaces, where the self that is presented is a reflection, extension and distillation of a particular individual. By adapting the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis methodology, I have investigated the experience of online persona creation in my current research, asking what it is like to create an artist’s persona online. In this paper I conceptualise three registers of performance of self, drawing on the experiences of artists whose practice places them outside of the traditional art world’s representational structures. These eight tattoo and street artists, performance poets and craftivists create online personas that engage not only with their artist selves (the ‘professional’), but also with aspects of their personal and intimate lives. In their use of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Instagram, and Tumblr, the artists are engaging in strategic impression management and role play, drawing on elements of the socially constructed artistic subject in ways that support their explicit or implicit self-identification as an artist. Operating within and between these registers of performance sees these artists negotiating between strategy and happenstance, specialisation and diversification, visibility and self-protection, self and collective, work and play, to present themselves as working artists to a geographically diverse network of fans, followers, friends and family.