Person and Persona

Lady in Red

In my obsessive reading about the financial crisis I stumbled on an interesting little section of an interview with Erin Callan, former CFO of Lehman, wherein she described her experience of becoming a Wall Street celebrity:

What mistakes did you make?

You can’t be naive about the press. I had a lot of positive exposure but didn’t recognize the opportunity for significant negative exposure. Exposure becomes celebrity, and you get a persona. That persona got away from me and the firm. There were so many pieces to it, not least of which was the phenomenon of a woman CFO on Wall Street.

Any PR person (or famehungry microcel) knows you have to have a persona.  People don’t have time to get to know you and understand your context and personality.  They have time to look at a picture of you and a headline, and then they generate a web of inferences that informs their idea of you, or, more accurately, “you.”  Yet this description of the process is brief and incredibly clear.  You get “exposure,” and then follows “celebrity,” and then you get a “persona.”  If you were consciously playing the game you would have figured out your persona first, then set about seeking the requisite exposure to become a celebrity.

All this brings up the question (it DOES NOT “beg the question,” see here): does the way that celebrities come into being make any sense?  Is it fair?  Is it sensible to apply the concept of fairness to it?  And fair to whom?

These questions are interesting, but here in the post-post-modern 21st century we should go a step further, and redesign our approach to celebrity from the ground up.  Oh, wait, some charming young people have done just that (and they gave me a job)!

Tags: Celebrity, Doing things from the ground up, Economics, Erin Callan, Lehman Brothers, Michael, Semiotics