In 2022, The Persona Is The Medium

Cecilia Seiter
3 min readNov 23, 2021

In 1964, Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The most famous snippet of this book arguably is the phrase “the medium is the message,” expressing that the forms and methods used to communicate information have a significant impact on the messages they deliver.

In 2021, Dean Kissick offered a counterpoint:

“Today’s most vital cultural forms are your identity, personality, and image. And in this new cultural paradigm, the artist’s performance of themself is often more important than the art they make. The persona is the message.”

I agree somewhat. We are irrefutably living in the “reputation age,” a time period characterized by the shunning of actual substance in lieu of perceived images and social media filters. These days, our outward appearances and behaviors — be they digital or analog — communicate more than our artistic output does. I can point to myself as a living example.

I’ve been a writer for most of my life. I introduce myself as a writer to people who ask me what I do for a living and what I do for fun. I’ve optimized my Instagram bio to read “Cecilia Seiter — rhymes with writer,” a calculated creative choice that shapes my online identity (and serves a subtle reminder to people who never remember how to pronounce my last name.)

It doesn’t matter that I haven’t written anything new in months, that my last book was published a year and a half ago or that I rarely do any kind of creative writing at all anymore. What matters is that I wear crisp-cut blazers to my coffee dates, muse and ponder on social media and read books so I can talk about the fact that I read books to other people. I present myself in conversation as the broken-hearted, unfettered writer whose aura is somehow both tantalizingly mysterious and embarrassingly vulnerable. My persona becomes the message. The question is not what I do. The question is, How do I look? How do I seem? What image of me do people harbor in their heads? Because it has become our reputation that is the currency we depend upon to communicate, and our reputations are shaped by our projected personas, not necessarily by what we create.

But I’d like to think that what I do create — the substance, or essence of my art — is…

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Cecilia Seiter

Hi, I’m Cecilia. I’m a professional freelance writer and occasional poet. https://ceciliaseiter.com/