Digital sentiment: Persona and the personal curation and industrial correlation of affect and emotion in our transformed digital human culture

For millennia, philosophers, social scientists and scientists have tried to work through the meaning of sentiment in our human cultures. This presentation investigates the transformation of human expression and emotion through its digital reformation. The presentation of the self – best identified as persona – represents a fictive gesture of what each of us attempts to convey to others (Marshall et al. 2020). Particularly over the last 20 years, billions of individuals now construct their public self through social media platforms as well as forms of engagement and connection to others every day in this digitally reconstructed environment. Digital sentiment pulls together how we as individuals and collectives curate our presentation of selves, but also how the digital industries and platforms correlate our digital persona in algorithmic reconstructions (Marshall 2021, Marshall 2022). Both the industries and their relation to what is best described as “programmatic advertising” and all of us as friends, followers, influencers and even lurkers engage in an active form of expression of our affective connection.
This presentation focuses on what linguistic analyses (McCulloch 2019; Zappavigna 2018 & others) have identified as “emotional emblems” and “metadata”, to map these dimensions of our own collectivized and individualized personal curation and industrial correlation of sentiment and affect. It will look at the way emoji, hashtags, memes and facial expression in the online environment construct a complex cultural, economic and political reconfiguration of sentiment in contemporary digital communication and our global cultures.
References:
Marshall, P David (2022) Correlating affect and emotion: Covidiquette and the expanding curation of online persona(s). Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology. Special issue “Upheaval: Affect, Emotion and Practice in Times of Crisis”, Vol 169:1, pp. 8-25 - Available Online
Marshall, P David. (2021) “The Dual Strategic Persona: Emotional Connection, Algorithms and the Transformation of Contemporary Online Reviewers.” In Unni From, Nete Nørgaard Kristensen and Helle Kannik Haastrup (eds.) Rethinking Cultural Critique: New Voices in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 113-135
Marshall, P. David, Moore, Christopher, and Barbour, Kim (2020) Persona Studies: An Introduction. Wiley Blackwell
Zappavigna M (2018) Searchable talk: Hashtags and social media metadiscourse. Bloomsbury Publishing.

McCulloch, Gretchen (2019) Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing. Vintage Press