Persona missing, feared drowned: the digital persona concept, two decades later
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to document the development path of a specific concept during its first 20 years.
Design/methodology/approach
Evidence was extracted of the citation-counts of relevant articles, uses of the term in other articles that do not cite the original articles, and uses of terms with similar meanings. Examination of the data took into account insights from epidemiology, memetics and diffusion of innovations theory.
Findings
The concept has had insufficient impact to overcome the weaknesses in theory and practice that it was intended to address. It has lacked champions. It has proven to be sufficiently fit to survive, but not to flourish.
Research limitations/implications
Google Scholar has a wide catchment area, and hence provides a basis for tracking the path of development of new ideas. However, the tools remain fairly blunt, and do not, for example, enable efficient extraction of patterns of citation over time, or the nature of the uses made of terms by the citing articles.
Practical implications
Neologisms take on a life of their own, losing the associations that they were intended to have with other ideas, and shedding their embedment in a body of theory. For a new term to successfully project a meme, its proponent must enthuse a critical mass of early adopters to apply it, and to generate a further round of adopters.
Originality/value
Concepts are seldom tracked over time. This paper shows that a new term and its associated body of theory require more than publications in top-level journals if they are to have significant impacts on academic research and industry practice.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
© Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, 2012-14.
The stimulus to develop this paper was provided by an invitation from Derrick de Kerckhove for an interview during a conference in Rome on 20 July 2012. The conference was “McLuhan: 100 Anni Dopo: Influenze trasversali sulla Persona Digitale: 5 scenari tra ieri e domain” (roughly, “100 Years On: Indirect Influences on the Digital Persona: 5 scenarios between yesterday and tomorrow”).
Citation
Clarke, R. (2014), "Persona missing, feared drowned: the digital persona concept, two decades later", Information Technology & People, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 182-207. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-04-2013-0073
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014, Authors