Nonhuman Online Personas (NHOPs) are coherent digital assemblages not directly associated with the identities of individual humans. NHOPs encompass entities like brands, places, artificial intelligences, and, as we explore in this study, video game characters. This article examines the NHOP of V, the customisable protagonist from the video game Cyberpunk 2077, to consider how such characters attain a virtual afterlife beyond the original text through collective fan engagement. We propose ‘persona analysis’ as a novel qualitative case study methodology for researching NHOPs. Our approach integrates netnography, analytic autoethnography and textual analysis, enabling a comprehensive examination of the emergent, unpredictable, and collective natures of online personas. Building on existing persona studies frameworks, we focus on the collective dimension of persona as the sets of negotiations between human and nonhuman actors through which the NHOP is constructed. Using V as a case study, we apply the five dimensions of persona—mediatisation, publicness, performance, collective, and value—to analyse the NHOP. Data was collected from online platforms where fan productions occur, including fan fiction, game mods, virtual photography, conversation, and discussion. This multi-platform approach allowed us to observe the extensive participatory practices of fans' co-construction of V’s NHOP with its developers. Our analysis reveals that V’s NHOP is a complex, rhizomatic assemblage resulting from the participatory interplay between in-game characters, fans, games designers, developers, the storyworld’s creators, and intellectual property owners. By extending persona studies to encompass NHOPs, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how online personas are collectively constructed. This, in turn, challenges established notions of online identity grounded in selfhood and opens new possibilities for examining the co-creation of online personas across all media types.

The past decade has seen an influx of academic work on and popular usage of the term ‘parasocial’, but this work largely theorises fans rather than listens to them. This paper corrects that. Drawing on 16 focus groups with fans of Harry Styles, I explore fans’ understanding and appropriation of the once-forgotten academic term, parasocial. Fans, here, are quite aware of Styles’s star persona and the illusion of their intimacy. They use the concept of parasociality to manage, understand, and police both their own behaviour and that of other fans. The paper argues that the fans actual parasociality and their usage of the term exists as a multisocial, fandom-wide experience, and mimics well-explored concepts in fan studies, including performativity, playful engagement with “easter eggs”, the “fangirl as pathology”, and boundary policing. Their performance of parasociality positions the concept as a normal part of the fan persona to be explored further academically, and at the same time, their self-conscious and hyper-nuanced use of the term contradicts its very definition.

During the medical superintendence of Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, from 1890 to 1907, he was watchful of his patients’ appearances, facial expressions and conduct. Of particular interest, Greenlees would closely monitor the patients’ faces to identify if there were any involuntary expressions that were indicators of underlying emotional unease or mental distress. Greenlees thus regarded involuntary facial expressions as a litmus test of a patient’s recovery, but it was the patient’s conscious facial expressions, as well as their presentation of upstanding behaviour and conduct, that signalled to the staff that they were self-composed, and hence on the path towards convalescence. In this article, I explore how three white male patients of the Asylum communicated their convalescence and/or restored mental health to the staff by posing for their casebook photographs and by presenting a gentlemanly persona. To this end, I interpret the photographs of the three men alongside entries from their casebooks as an interface to explore dimensions of time that lie outside the split second that was captured by the camera lens. In doing so, the glimpses of a patient’s agency and appearance in a photograph can be understood and compared with their performance of a gentlemanly persona that was recorded in the casebooks.

Shaytards was widely considered the original YouTube family vlog, and the family built their massive following with representations of wholesome, heteronormative, religious Americans who could have fun with everyday life. As classic microcelebrities (Senft 2013), the family of six created a valuable brand for millions of fans, which led to fame and wealth. But when the father and driving force of the vlog was caught sending sexually explicit texts to a “cam model”, more than the family brand collapsed. Shay’s persona, as the steady father force for an imagined family (Friedman & Schultermandl 2016) of millions was sent into disarray. This article follows the comments across multiple channels that show how the imagined family negotiated this collapse, demonstrating how an audience can establish a deep personal connection with a microcelebrity’s persona.

Digital automedia have become a standard mechanism for academics seeking to construct and promote their professional profiles. Through a range of autobiographical forms enabled by the digital age, on-line platforms, including blogs, Facebook groups, and Twitter, have become something of a business card for academics. But what about the self-authored personnel narratives that are not shared publicly and serve, nonetheless, as self-portraits of academic life?. Even tenure and promotion applications, employment letters, and CVs, the most often required documents to gain and maintain access to professional opportunity in academia, are going digital. And they are evolving with the digital age. In some stages of personnel review, those requests are made and via digital methods. Software used for standardization and efficiency, mediates representation of academic subjectivity by restricting users to entering details according the parameters set not only by the standards of the profession, the institutional subscriber, but also by the operating system. Increasing reliance on such systems further reduces academic personhood to chartfields and biodigital data entry that is counter-intuitive to the syncretic processes of making meaning by which individuals experience, remember, and recount their lives inclusive of their careers. My essay turns to narrative theory to assess the impact of digital tools and methods of personnel review on the assemblage and portraiture of academic subjectivity.

This article examines the elements and processes involved in the visual construction of person brands, and their personas as key components of those brands, in pursuit of the research question: What pictorial design strategies make person brands succeed? Key findings of the empirical investigation of the iconic artist brand Madonna allow a focus on Madonna’s image and her fans’ co-creative image practice through a visual frame analysis and cultural reading of her self-brand. Madonna has created a complex ‘worldview world’ that is governed by a metanarrative and feeds on the diverse acts of referencing cultural image icons. At the same time, central strategies of her image representations are reflected in the fan artefacts investigated. This article thus focuses not only on the role of the visual in person branding and in a modern-day visual brand culture. It also considers the place and form of such cultural person branding within the persona studies field.

Scholarship and academic enquiry are complex entities. Individuals sequester themselves to complete their projects, publications, and manuscripts, and this solo activity can make us collectively think that the ivory tower of academic life is real. But the real hub of research, and its genuine success, is built from the process of exchange: conversations, discussions, engagements, re-readings and – building from this activity – amendments and integration of other related ideas, concepts, and trials. This journal has built from these exchanges as are the scholarly and academic personas (Barbour & Marshall 2012; Marshall, Barbour & Moore 2018) that we enact to present and perform our work: we depend on this “verkehr” (Marx & Engels 1970) to both advance our ideas and to ensure that those ideas (and our professional identities) have some impact and value.

This article considers how David Bowie’s last persona, The Blackstar, framed his death through the narratives of mourning it provoked on the social media site Reddit. The official narrative of death, through the media, and the unofficial narrative of death, through the fan, can contradict each other, with fans usually bringing their own lived experiences to the mourning process. David Bowie is a performer of personas. While Bowie died in 2016, his personas have continued to live on, informing his legacy, his work, and his death reception. Through the concepts of persona, narrative, authenticity, late style, and mourning, this article finds that Bowie’s Blackstar persona actively constructs fan’s interaction with Bowie’s death. Instead of separate and contradicting narratives, this article finds that users on Reddit underpin and extend the official narrative of his death, using Bowie’s persona as a way to construct and establish their own mourning. As such, Bowie’s last persona is further entrenched as one of authentic mourning, of a genius constructing his own passing. With these narratives, fans construct their own personas, informing how they too would like to die: artistically and with grace.