What is a Digital Persona?

Abstract

Digital persona (Clark, R., 1994) is a part of the individual identity that has been extended into the online sphere to which corresponds a digital unconscious (de Kerckhove, D., 2012) structuring a digitally divided self (Quartiroli, I., 2011). It has personal, social, institutional, legal, scientific and technological aspects that have to be reconsidered to allow for new ways of understanding and managing identity.

However, the fragmentation of scientific analysis fails to explain what happens to the digital personae in an interdisciplinary way. This is reflected by the current lack of comprehensive framework, the tendency to develop fragmentary management tools and gaps in legal frameworks. In this context society, experts, institutions and groups are still in a fragile unconscious, or pre-conscious phase, regarding the opportunities and problems associated with the management of digital persona.

The objective of this paper is to offer a first set of comprehensive features that shape the personal and social sense of digital selfhood and identity and provoke a reflection regarding the future personal, social and institutional management of our digital personae. This on-going research aims at contributing to define the digital persona and to develop models and typologies of digital personhood that are still being developed.