The Triumph of Profiling

The Self in Digital Culture

Andreas Bernard, Valentine A. Pakis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509536306, 9781509536290
• eBook ISBN: 9781509536313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Until fairly recently, only serial killers and lunatics had profiles. Yet today, almost everyone is profiled through social media, mobile phones, and a multitude of other methods. But where does the idea of "profiling" come from, how has it changed over time, and what are its implications?

In this book, Andreas Bernard examines contemporary profiling's roots in late-nineteenth-century criminology, psychology, and psychiatry. Data collection techniques previously used exclusively by police or to identify groups of people are now applied to all individuals in society. GPS transmitters and measuring devices are now unconsciously embraced to have fun, communicate, make money, or even find a partner. Drawing perceptive parallels between modern technologies and their antecedents, Bernard shows how we have unwittingly internalized what were once instruments of external control and repression.

This illuminating genealogy of contemporary digital culture will be of interest to students and scholars in media and communication, and to anyone concerned about the power technologies hold over our lives.

1
Profiles: The Development of a Format

An old political debate reopened when, within just a few months in 2012, the United States was shocked by two mass shootings, one in a movie theatre in Denver and the other at an elementary school in Connecticut. The question was whether there might be better ways to identify potential perpetrators in advance so as to prevent similar atrocities from happening in the future. To the familiar suspicious signs – the introverted nature of the predominantly male offenders, their social isolation, and their history of psychiatric treatment – was now added an additional criterion: the reluctance of the killers to participate on social media. As reporters were quick to point out, neither James Eagan Holmes nor Adam Lanza had a profile on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Like the Norwegian Anders Breivik, who had committed a similar crime the year before, Holmes and Lanza refused to join the internet's omnipresent portals for communication and self-representation, and this refusal was being characterized as a warning sign. Recruitment managers at large companies reminded the public that it was now a common practice to look at the online profiles of job applicants and that an applicant's complete absence from social networks was highly peculiar. This opinion found support in a 2011 study conducted by the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Bélanger, who discovered a “u-shaped association” between internet activity and the mental health of adolescents: “Health care providers should thus be alerted both when caring for adolescents who do not use the Internet or use it rarely, as well as for those who are online several hours daily.”¹ In today's digital culture, as this discussion makes clear, it is now a matter of irritation when people of a certain age have neglected to create a public double of themselves online in the form of profiles, status updates, comments, and so on. In the Western world, this abstinence has even become the first indication of psychiatric abnormality, perhaps of a mental illness or possibly of a latent pathological impulse that might one day be discharged in a harrowing act of violence. Conversely, the regular use of social media is now regarded as evidence of good health and normality.

My reflections in this book about the status of the self in digital culture are concerned with the methods, services, and devices that have become ubiquitous and, in light of their daily use, have increasingly come to seem like a natural disposition. In the history of the representation of subjectivity, however, they are in fact an astonishingly recent development. Anyone who attended school or university just a quarter-century ago will remember how few options were available then for representing one's own personality, preferences, and convictions to the public – a patch on the back of a jacket, a few lines beneath one's yearbook picture, or an expensive personal ad that would run for just one day in the local newspaper. This minimal radius of publicity for anyone without constant access to the mass media was still the invariable reality at the beginning of the 1990s, and yet those years now feel like a distant and unfamiliar epoch.

In no time at all – Facebook became open to everyone in the fall of 2006, and there have been smartphones since 2007 and app stores since 2008 – a comprehensive digital culture has emerged whose manifestations have been studied, celebrated, or demonized by journalists and academics on an ongoing basis. The origins of this culture in the history of knowledge, however, have seldom been discussed (and when they have been, it has been from the perspective of computer science). The aim of this book is to trace back just such a genealogy in order to demonstrate how digital media technologies have been embedded in the history of the human sciences. Ultimately, what is most striking about today's methods of self-representation and self-perception – the profiles of social media, but also the various locational functions on smartphones or the bodily measurements of the “quantified-self movement” – is the fact that they all derive from methods of criminology, psychology, or psychiatry that were conceived at various points since the end of the nineteenth century. Certain techniques for collecting data, which were long used exclusively by police detectives or scientific authorities to identify suspicious groups of people, are now being applied to everyone who uses a smartphone or social media. Biographical descriptions, GPS transmitters, and measuring devices installed on bodies are no longer just instruments for tracking suspected criminals but are now being used for the sake of having fun, communicating, making money, or finding a romantic partner.

A conceptual history of the profile in the twentieth century

In this regard, the category of the profile is especially instructive. As is well known, this element plays an essential role in any exchange conducted on social media. The profile of members on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook – the place where they describe themselves and where their personal information, texts, photos, and videos are gathered – is the nodal point of interaction. Thus, even the earliest research devoted to social media placed the profile at the heart of its analysis. In her influential essays about Friendster, for instance, Danah Boyd repeatedly takes this element as her starting point. One of her pieces from 2006, co-written with Jeffrey Heer, begins as follows: “Profiles have become a common mechanism for presenting one's identity online.”² To the creators of a profile, who are simultaneously its object, Boyd thus attributes a high degree of sovereignty. They enjoy complete autonomy in the public representation of their self, and the more original and comprehensive this representation is, the stronger the reaction it will entice from other users of the social network in question: “By paying the cost of carefully crafting an interesting profile,” as Boyd and Judith Donath concluded about Friendster in 2004, “one can make more connections.”³ In her essays, Boyd frequently describes the practice of self-formation as an “identity performance,” and she stresses that this creative and productive activity has “shifted the Profile from being a static representation of self to a communicative body in conversation with the other represented bodies.”⁴ This is therefore the great promise of the format: It is a free and self-determined space in which its creators can set the scene with a desirable, more or less honest, and more or less polished public persona.

Yet despite all of this, it should not be forgotten that, a mere 20 to 25 years ago, only serial killers and madmen were the objects of such profiles. Over the past quarter-century, this form of knowledge – this pattern for describing human beings – has experienced a rapid and profound transformation. In light of its use today, it would thus be informative to engage with the historical semantics of the concept. In which contexts and at which point in time did the written profile emerge? Who was its author, who was its object, and why was it created? In the sense of a “short, vivid biography outlining the most outstanding characteristics of the subject,” as the 1968 edition of Webster's dictionary defines it,⁵ the term has a relatively young history (German dictionaries and encyclopedias would not adopt this definition until later on). In the early modern era, the word “profile” was first used in architectural and geological contexts and denoted the contours of buildings or mountain ranges; in the eighteenth century, it also came to mean the side view of a face. It was apparently not until the early twentieth century that the profile was understood in the sense of a tabulated or schematic outline providing information about a person.

If my impression is correct, the word first appeared with this meaning as a technical term in the work of the Russian neurologist Grigory I. Rossolimo, who ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• 1: Profiles: The Development of a Format
• 2: Locations: GPS and the Aesthetics of Suspicion
• 3: Cavity Searches: Bodily Measurements and the Quantified-Self Movement
• 4: The Forgotten Fear of Registration
• 5: The Power of Internalization
• Works Cited
• Index
• End User License Agreement