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.
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 published an article in 1910 titled “Psychological Profiles.” In this study, which was translated into German after the First World War and adopted by a number of psychologists, Rossolimo designed a procedure for measuring certain aptitudes among children – their attention span, memory capacity, associative ability, and so on – on a scale of one to ten. At the end of this testing procedure, according to Rossolimo, all of the “data points, which represented various levels of development, could be plotted on a diagram and connected to form a curve that would represent a detailed psychological profile” of the subject in question.6 In Russia, these values were used above all to place children with behavioral problems into the appropriate types of schools. “The psychological profile,” as Karl Bartsch noted in his adaptation of the method, “enables us to analyze and clarify the functions of the juvenile mind, and it reveals avenues toward the proper therapeutic and pedagogical treatment of diagnosed disorders.”7
From the beginning, then, the epistemic interest of the profile consisted in providing evaluative information about the identity and behavior of deviant subjects. Bartsch, who refined the interpretation of Rossolimo's procedures and referred to his young patients as “psychopaths,” asked the following about an ill-behaved child with a long history of behavioral problems: “Who can understand him without knowing his psychological profile?” He even calculated a precise relationship between a child's “profile curve” and how institutions should react to it: “All children from the age of 7 who do not achieve a profile score of 4,” according to Bartsch's recommendation, “should be sent to a school for special education.” What was always at stake whenever profiles were created – whenever, as the psychologist Fritz Giese wrote in 1923, “a sort of psychological cross-section could be drawn through human beings” – was the normality and healthiness of those being tested.8
Although the “psychological profile” in the sense outlined above went out of fashion around the year 1930, it soon re-emerged in a new context of knowledge from where it would go on to gain widespread popularity in the late twentieth century. After the Second World War, concerted efforts were made in the United States to get to the bottom of unsolved crimes (especially those thought to have been committed by repeat offenders), and these efforts led to increased cooperation between criminologists and psychoanalysts. Just as conventional police work sought to analyze the material clues left at a crime scene in order to come closer to identifying the perpetrator, by means of fingerprints or bullet shells, the forensic-psychological perspective began to concentrate on immaterial and emotional clues – on the question, that is, of how such things as hatred, anger, rage, passion, or other eruptions of inner feelings might have left traces at the scene of a crime. Although this search for impressions left by the criminal personality – this practice of criminal-psychological ballistics – played a part in solving a number of spectacular serial crimes as early as the 1950s (for instance, the case of New York's “mad bomber,” George Metesky), the method was first described as “psychiatric profiling” in a 1962 essay about notorious arsonists by the psychoanalyst Louis Gold.9
One major difference distinguished the “psychiatric profile” of criminology from the earlier use of the term in applied psychology: it was now the case that unknown persons were meant to be identified by means of this gathering of knowledge. The test was replaced by the manhunt, and a quantifiable scientific statement was replaced by a hypothesis. At this early stage, this new tracking technique depended on the charisma and almost prophetic intuition of individual forensic psychologists such as James Brussel. It was not until the end of the 1970s that “criminal profiles,” as they are now known, were formulated in a systematic manner, and this development took place at a newly established division of the FBI called the “Behavioral Science Unit.” Here, psychologists and criminologists were tasked with testing new methods in response to the rising crime rate in the United States. Ever since the 1960s, according to the FBI, not only had the number of unsolved murders been growing – statistics showed that cases in which the offender was unknown to the victim had increased from 10 to 30 percent of the total. Richard Ault and James Reese, whose foundational essay on the new method appeared in the in-house journal, the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, made the following observation: “As the crime rate grows in this country and the criminals become more sophisticated, the investigative tools of the police officer must also become more sophisticated. One such sophisticated tool … is the psychological assessment of crime – profiling.”10
According to Ault and Reese, profiling would enable detectives to decipher the behavioral patterns and motives of criminals on the basis of clues left behind at the scenes of unsolved violent crimes. One of the directors of the Behavioral Science Unit summarized this strategy concisely: “Knowing ‘why’ will often tell us ‘who.’”11 From the state of the crime scene, detectives could tell whether the offender's methods were organized or unorganized, and on the basis of this simple difference they could begin to narrow down the possible identity of the unknown criminal. Did he live in the immediate vicinity of the victim? Would his apartment be messy or clean? Were they dealing with an eloquent or socially excluded perpetrator? White or black? Fat or skinny (forensic psychologists were convinced that certain mental illnesses manifested themselves in ascetic eating behavior)? At the beginning of their pioneering article, Ault and Reese claim that a series of seven rapes, each with the same recognizable modus operandi, could be solved within a week after the creation of a criminal profile. The latter might contain some of the following conjectured information: “1) The perpetrator's race, 2) Sex, 3) Age range, 4) Marital status, 5) General employment, 6) Reaction to questioning by police, 7) Degree of sexual maturing, 8) Whether the individual might strike again, 9) The possibility that he/she has committed a similar offense in the past, 10) Possible police record.”12
In 1980, the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin was devoted entirely to this new form of tracking. Ault and Reese's article is followed by several others in which the concept of the criminal profile is applied specifically to cases of arson or sexual violence. Moreover, the staff of the Behavioral Science Unit began to conduct a long-term series of psychological interviews with convicted mass murderers. In all of this, the ambition to distill individual mental features from a series of crimes was inextricably tied to the presumed illness of the offender in question. As early as 1962, Louis Gold remarked: “It is generally accepted that a person who sets a fire intentionally is committing an abnormal act. His reasoning at this time is perverse, distorted.… The roots of such perverse and aberrant behavior are deep within the personality and have some relationship to sexual disturbance.”13 Ault and Reese likewise underscored the following point: “It is most important that this investigative technique be confined chiefly to crimes against the person where the motive is lacking and where there is sufficient data to recognize the presence of psychopathology at the crime scenes.”14 Profiles were thus created only when no apparent meaning could be derived from the crime itself; on the basis of chaotic crime scenes, they were meant to bring to light the rationality and comparability that the wild rage of the perpetrator had initially obscured. “Psychological profiling,” as Anthony Rider noted about arsonists in particular, “should be applied only to those cases in which the unknown subject demonstrates some form of mental, emotional, or behavioral disturbance in the crime. Unless there is perceptible psychopathology present in the crime, a profile cannot be rendered on an unknown subject.”15
For the FBI, the condition of possibility for the criminal profile was thus the insanity of the offender. The number of cases in which this new method was applied in the United States grew rapidly (in 1979 there were only 65, and in 1980 this number already surpassed 200), while in Germany the first criminal profile – commissioned, incidentally, by the FBI – was created in 1984.16 The method did not receive widespread public attention, however, until the beginning of the 1990s, and this was largely due to the film The Silence of the Lambs, in which an FBI agent trained in psychology manages to convict a serial killer. In the wake of this movie, the work of the “profiler” became a phenomenon of popular culture. A few veterans from the Behavioral Science Unit, such as Robert Ressler and John Douglas, published successful memoirs, and their type of activity has since become a fundamental component of numerous crime shows on television, among them Criminal Minds, Millennium, Cracker, and Profiler.
What a brief conceptual history of the profile reveals at once is the fact that, for an entire century, this format has been used to describe individuals in situations involving tests or manhunts. In light of Foucault's fundamental insight that, since the late eighteenth century, knowledge about human beings has been generated predominantly by marginal subjects – that the question of how to track down identities or measure bodies was driven above all by the psychiatric registration of the sick and by the police's access to criminals – it can be said that this trend was consolidated in the knowledge format of the profile. Its object was someone under evaluation or being hunted, and its creators were representatives of state authority, police authority, or scientific authority. In the profiles of the twentieth century, the relations of institutional power were realized with particular clarity. To this extent, the success stories of psychiatry and criminology can be told alongside the genesis of their registration and recording techniques.17
Even in the term's older semantic contexts, this constellation is already present. In its art-historical sense as a side view, the word “profile” had been used since the second half of the eighteenth century when attempts were made to systematize and classify certain categories of knowledge through representations of the human face. In the work of Johann Caspar Lavater, the silhouette in profile was transformed from a leisurely form of art into a cryptographic system whose proper interpretation could unlock the inner life of any man or woman. In his treatise On Physiognomy, which first appeared in 1772, Lavater left no doubt that portraits ought to depict the side of the face. As evidence for this thesis, he compared a physiognomically relevant profile drawing by Montesquieu with a less revealing portrait and declared that, in the latter, “the view of the painter, and thus the action of the muscles […] does not present to us the natural condition but rather something that is largely forced, stiff, or tense.” This disadvantage of the frontal perspective is alleviated by profile representations because anyone who allows himself to be drawn in this manner does so, according to Lavater, “in large part because the eye of the painter does not govern him but rather looks upon him more naturally and freely.”18 Profile images thus enable greater objectivity and are therefore better suited for physiognomic interpretation. A century later, a similar argument was made by the Parisian criminologist Alphonse Bertillon when he presented his new system for identifying repeat offenders. This system, which he referred to as “anthropometry,” involved a series of bodily measurements that were supplemented by profile photographs of delinquents. “It is the profile with precise lines,” according to Bertillon, “that best represents the particular individuality of any given face.”19 He believed that this was the case because of the highly identifiable nature of the ear, the form of which differs from person to person and cannot be obscured by any changes of expression while a photograph is being taken. Lavater's and Bertillon's observations make it clear that, as a side view, the profile provided types of knowledge about analyzed and classified subjects that are similar to the types produced later by the tabular and written format with the same name.20
The establishment of digital culture over the past quarter-century was accompanied by a massive redefinition and expansion of this format. Whereas Rossolimo's intelligence tests and the FBI's tracking methods were concerned with recording deviant behavior, the objective of today's profiles is largely to underscore the particular attractiveness, competence, or social integration of the person represented. As the debate over the media behavior of the mass murderers from 2012 demonstrated, the format now represents the normal instead of the pathological. How did this shift come about? In which contexts did the coerced personal description transform into something voluntarily created?
In the mid-1990s, when networked and interactive computers spread beyond the confines of American military authorities and hackers to become the global form of communication known as the internet, the technological conditions for creating public spheres changed in a fundamental way. The rapid growth of the “world wide web” and of commercial browsers such as Netscape made it possible for every user to publicize his or her own persona without engaging with the mass media's costly means of production. From the beginning, online “communication” meant not only the acceleration of exchanges between known people (i.e. the transition from letters or faxes to email) but also the ability to address previously unknown people via forums and platforms on the internet.
It was in this new and digital public sphere that the first traces of self-made profiles appeared. For instance, the website Match.com, which today has more than 30 million registered users, began its operations as the first online-dating platform at the beginning of 1995. The earliest version of the site contained the following advice: “Become a member by registering and placing your profile.” In an advertisement from 1996, moreover, the company boasted: “Match.com features engaging member profiles.”21 In recent years, the sociologist Eva Illouz has written extensively on the operating principles of online dating on Match.com and similar sites and has also focused on the profile as a format of self-representation. When registering, users have to answer dozens of questions about their physical appearance, interests, lifestyle, and values in order to provide other members with enough information about themselves and to furnish Match.com's psychologists with a sufficient amount of standardizable material. The hope of finding a “match” among the multitude of potential partners is synonymous with compatibility of two profiles. In her studies, Illouz is primarily interested in the ambivalence of the platforms between intimacy and marketability, between the exposure and commodification of individuals.22 Regarding the genealogy of the profile concept, Illouz's research, which extends back to the turn of the millennium, is significant if only because it demonstrates how early on this format had established itself as the central form of representing the self in online dating. Only a few years before, the profile was still exclusively known as an instrument for monitoring delinquent subjects, yet in the world of online dating it quickly revealed its greater productive potential as a site for self-description.
Two years after Match.com's IPO in January of 1997, a lawyer named Andrew Weinreich introduced his idea for a website called SixDegrees.com. The goal of this site was not to bring together possible romantic partners but rather to build up a network of friends and acquaintances. Weinreich's presentation is preserved in a grainy YouTube video that, as of the fall of 2018, had attracted a mere 31 views. Such neglect is rather astounding because it is safe to say that this speech represents social media's moment of birth (at least as the term is understood today). Active from 1997 to 2001, SixDegrees was an online network that grew to 3.5 million users and 150 employees but, because of the slow and immobile internet connections of the late 1990s and the limitation of available data to texts, failed to generate lasting attention. This was quite unlike Friendster and Facebook – founded in 2002 and 2003, respectively – whose users had increasing access to broadband internet and digital cameras, and which thus mark the first chapter of social media's global success story.
Weinreich began his speech with the following remarks: “Networking today is the same as it was ten years ago, as it was fifty years ago, as it was a hundred years ago. Today we hope to change that. Today we hope to make history and change how networking works.”23 This confident announcement is followed by a presentation of the SixDegrees website, which did in fact contain all of the basic elements of the subsequent, epoch-shaping social media platforms. At its heart were the profiles of its users. Even though we now tend to associate this format with the billions of self-descriptions on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, it is certainly possible to identify a sort of prototype in the idea behind SixDegrees.24 This prototype is described in minute detail in a patent with the title “Method and Apparatus for Constructing a Networking Database and System,” which Weinreich and his collaborators submitted on the day that the SixDegrees website went live. The importance of the category of the profile to this system is apparent in the fact that the patented computer program required new users to register by “providing certain requested information.” Without such information, the network would not be able to function; new “friends” could not be added, and it would be impossible to search for people with certain characteristics. In a section of the patent titled “Editing Personal Profile,” it is stressed once more that, having registered, “the user may list various personal and professional information including e-mail address(es), last name, first name, aliases, occupation, geography, hobbies, skills or expertise, and the like.” The abundance of information about each user went hand in hand with SixDegrees's stated business model, which was to offer “an e-mail service wherein a user is assigned an e-mail address in exchange for a profile describing themselves and their tastes.” The plan was for every user of SixDegrees to receive individually tailored advertisements on his or her personal page.25
In this proto-program of social media from 1997, the profile was thus something from which the business hoped to turn a profit. The service could only be offered for free because its users would indirectly pay for it with a self-made biographical sketch that would provide potential advertisers with previously unknown information about their lives. From the beginning, then, profiles have had two sides in the history of social media: for members, they have provided a free and flexible format of self-representation, while for businesses they have served as a lucrative reservoir containing a wealth of information about real people – real consumers. Exactly how high the economic expectations were for this reservoir became clear when, in 1999, Weinreich and his business partners expressed that the patent would be put up for sale by the new owners of the SixDegrees website. The auction, which took place in 2003, prompted a bidding war for the program among social media pioneers and entrepreneurs in related businesses. Having won the auction with a bid of $700,000, Reid Hoffmann, the co-owner of a recently founded network called LinkedIn, referred to his purchase as a “seminal social-networking patent” that could provide economic and technological guidelines for the development of his own enterprise.26
It is worth dwelling on the fact that Weinreich had given his platform, which he thought would revolutionize the possibilities of social networking and could possibly contain “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individuals,”27 the name “SixDegrees.” In 1997, this term had a familiar ring to it because it featured in a social-networking thought experiment that had recently gained popularity through the traditional media of theatre and film. In 1990, a play titled Six Degrees of Separation debuted in a small theatre on Broadway. The piece went on to become a big success in the United States and was made into an acclaimed movie in 1993. With the title of his website, Weinreich was thus referring to the popular hypothesis at the time that, through friends of friends, any two people could be linked in six steps or fewer.28 In John Guare's play and in the film, this experiment is carried out through the example of two married couples in New York, both of whom fall victim to a con-artist claiming to be Sydney Poitier's son and a close friend of their children at Harvard. The rest of the plot follows the couples as they attempt to figure out the identity of the unknown man and his mysterious relationship with their sons and daughters, who claim never to have heard of him before. From today's perspective, the work mostly seems like a case study of how to generate knowledge under pre-digital conditions, for all of the questions that search engines and social media can now resolve with a few clicks – Does Sydney Poitier have a son? Who is part of our children's circle of friends? – have to be answered by the swindled families through protracted consultations with traditional media: by means of an autobiography of Poitier bought at a used bookstore, student yearbooks at Harvard, and ultimately the New York Times, in which a journalist known to one of the couples writes an article about the con-artist's methods.
Weinreich was thus quite precise in choosing the name “SixDegrees” for the first online network of friends. After all, the contingency and frustrating evasiveness of social relations that gave the play its title could now, thanks to new communication technology, be restrained and used productively to at least the second degree. The format for organizing this confounding web of relations was the profile: a simple personal description that quickly and conveniently made every member identifiable to his or her circle of acquaintances. In the age of social media, the notion of the profile implicitly suggests that a con-man pretending to be Sydney Poitier's son would be found out in a matter of seconds. Even in this era of affirmative self-description, that is, the profile can still be useful to the police. The six degrees of separation between any two people, which on the eve of the digitalization of social relations could still drive the plot of a dark tale of deception, are now becoming transparent and traceable.
Although the self-made profile first appeared during the second half of the 1990s on social networks and online dating sites, the format soon emerged in a context that was not truly related to the new medium of the internet. In the genre of job-application manuals, which have been flourishing on the book market in conjunction with the gradual standardization of “job-application culture,” the concept quickly gained enormous popularity. In Germany, the books by Christian Püttjer and Uwe Schnierda have occupied a dominant position in such literature for the past 25 years. By now, the duo has produced more than 60 guidebooks of this sort, with titles such as Confidence in Interviews, Success in the Assessment Center, or The Definitive Job-Application Handbook (their magnum opus).29
These books and brochures began to attribute an important role to the concept of the profile by the end of the 1990s. In their 1999 handbook Applications and Resumés for College Graduates, for instance, the authors stressed that “lacking a profile” was the most detrimental factor for applicants, and in a section called “The Rules of Persuasion” they advised job-seekers especially to “create an individual profile.”30 In these early publications, however, the concept did not yet serve as the keyword and foundation of their entire approach to applying for jobs. This changed around the turn of the millennium, when Püttjer and Schnierda trademarked their so-called “profile method” and began to include this term in the titles or subtitles of most of their books.31 According to Christian Püttjer, their focus on the profile was a response to a media-technical shift in the job market – namely the establishment, around the year 2000, of online job applications – which resulted in the implementation of stricter formal standards and limited the space allowed for narrative elements in covering letters.32 “The modern requirements for job applications,” or so begins The Definitive Job-Application Handbook, “can only be met by creating a profiled presentation of oneself.” Every stage of a job search is now organized according to this basic category: “Show your profile when making personal contact with potential employers, make sure that it occupies a clear place in your job-application portfolio, present it in phone calls with the businesses you would like to join, and seamlessly integrate it into your interviews.”33 Across the 550 pages of the book, the term recurs in numerous variations: “qualification profile,” “job profile,” “application profile,” “short profile,” and so on.
Yet how, in Püttjer and Schnierda's estimation, does an “individual profile brimming with informative keywords” have to look in order for job-seekers to “achieve their goal and find a desirable position?” The three “cornerstones” of the profile method, which the authors list at the beginning of every publication, seem rather ambivalent in certain respects. The third point – “trustworthiness” – contains the following exhortation: “Do not distort yourself; your personality is in demand!” And yet this injunction to represent yourself as authentically as possible contradicts the first point, which requires the “precise fit” of applicants and makes the following claim: “The more you cater to the stated job requirements in your application, the more likely you will be to succeed. Adopt the perspective of the HR department.”34 This dual challenge – the conflict between honest introspection and adapting oneself to suit the needs of others – is perhaps indicative of a fundamental characteristic of the self-made profile: it is a format that simultaneously allows for both the utmost individuality and the utmost conformity.
To the extent that the goal of self-description is to suit the prescribed requirements of an employer as closely as possible, today's independently created profiles approximate those created in the name of applied psychology and criminology. In job-application profiles, the external perspective of the psychologist or criminal investigator, which was directed toward pathological schoolchildren or unknown offenders, has simply been transferred to the authors themselves. They must be able to view themselves with the unerring eyes of the businesses where they might want to work. In this light, it makes sense that Püttjer and Schnierda offer the following advice to those creating profiles: “Become a detective on your own case and uncover your professional past!”35 Thus, the application specialists themselves imply that criminal investigation can serve as a fitting model for representing oneself on the job market. Today's profiles, though composed in a gesture of sovereign individuality, conform to a prescribed set of requisites, and it is presumably this very conflict that gave rise to the contradictory metaphors in Püttjer and Schnierda's guidebooks. As the authors repeatedly stress, profiles need to have “sharp contours,” and yet they also urge applicants to “round out their profiles.”36 The incoherence of this imagery demonstrates the paradoxical demands of the format. Representing a unique yet fully adaptable individual, the ideal profile has to be precisely and imprecisely delineated at the same time.
Today, more than 20 years after the arrival of social media and the firm establishment of job-application guides, the profile is an unchallenged and omnipresent form of subjectivization. On the job market, networks such as LinkedIn or Xing, which have millions of members, have made it a structural necessity for professional self-representations to be created in the form of online profiles. In a milieu like the university, every academic homepage, every research proposal, and every project description now has to be accompanied by an impressive “researcher profile” or “applicant profile.” As discussed above, the creation and maintenance of personal profiles on social media have become indicators of sound mental health. The format thus appears in both professional and private spheres as a faithful and autonomously manageable representative of the self, and people can constantly be heard talking about their own profiles.
This success story, however, not only disguises the historical fact that the format was developed as a normalizing and disciplinary instrument. It also diverts attention away from the present reality that, in tandem with the triumph of self-made profiles, the format has become a more effective means of describing and controlling others than ever before. In digital culture, the novel effects of profiles in the formation of the subject are offset by the multifaceted tendency to treat individuals as the object of standardized and interconnected data acquisition. Concepts such as the “user profile,” “personality profile,” or “customer profile” involve not only the actively and voluntarily divulged data of the user but also information about the user that has been collected, largely without notice, by companies, authorities, and agencies. The latter practice – a technique from surveying and census-taking – is, of course, far older than the recent history of self-generated profiles.37
Over the past 15 years, a central stage for this method has been marketing. Before the establishment of social networks, the ability to address potential customers depended entirely on the crude and unilateral channels of mass media. Advertisements in newspapers, on the radio, or on television thus had the same form for all readers, listeners, or viewers, and the impact of a company's new slogan or campaign was tied to the hope that the creative genius of the advertising agency could capture the attention of the widest possible circle of consumers. Through the fragmentation of the media system in digital culture, in which every user is simultaneously a consumer and producer, the anonymous masses have transformed into a multitude of individually addressable people. Under these new technological conditions, “marketing” means defining smaller and smaller target groups and even, in the ideal case, addressing individual customers with customized information. In this communicative situation, the profile is the place where advertisers can gather and evaluate information about their addressees.
The relationship between businesses and targeted consumers resembles that between forensic psychology and criminals, and marketing specialists have themselves noticed this and even emphasized the point. Since 2003, for instance, the German business consultant Andreas Wenzlau has offered a service called KundenProfiling (“Customer Profiling”), which he derived from the somewhat older American concept of “consumer profiling.”38 The logo used on his website and on his self-published handbook is thus an enlarged fingerprint. In the preface to the latter work, Wenzlau claims that he compared “the structures of criminological profiling with today's marketing practices” and discovered “very interesting parallels.” “While wrestling with questions concerning customers, acquisition, and marketing,” he goes on, “I was struck by an idea: New methods and options would be needed to understand the actual motives of consumers. It would have to become possible to enter the customers’ minds!”39 The term “customer profiling,” however, is an explicit expression of what has become a fundamental business model in the digital age of search engines, social networks, and online services. As is well known, global firms such as Google and Facebook have built their empires on the promise, first formulated by Andrew Weinreich, that companies are able to tailor, with previously unthinkable flexibility, the form and frequency of their advertisements for individual users. In 2007, for instance, Google patented a controversial method that enabled the company to construct reliable “user profiles” from the behavior of computer game players. Along with a player's individual tactics, the amount of time he or she spends on a gaming platform supposedly provides insights into the user's consumer preferences and thus enables highly effective advertisements to be placed at specific points in time.40
Over the past 15 years, the fact that companies possess such profile-based knowledge has provoked specific questions concerning data protection. In a country such as Germany, which has complex legal provisions governing “informational self-determination,” the development of the profile format was greeted with critical commentary from early on. As early as the year 2000, in an article on the use of personality profiles for marketing purposes, the lawyer Petra Wittig formulated grave “legal objections” against this form of data processing, and she stressed her conviction that even the consent of customers would do nothing to change the problematic nature of such a practice. The individual right to self-determination loses its validity, according to Wittig, “when personal integrity is placed without restriction at the disposal of those interested in data.” The creation of “user profiles” in marketing would therefore have to be forbidden in principle on the basis of the fundamental right to “informational self-determination.”41 Despite this early criticism, however, the precise legal status of the format was slow to be defined. As Christoph Schnabel noted in his 2009 dissertation on data protection and the concept of the profile, “there has yet to be a single case of legislation in which the creation of a profile has been treated as unlawful.” As of 2009, according to Schnabel, the format of the user profile did not even qualify as a “legal concept”42 – a loophole that was not closed until recently. In May, 2018, the European Union's long-discussed “General Data Protection Regulation,” which attempts to strike a balance between free trade and legal stability, finally came into effect. This regulation, which unifies the previously heterogeneous legislation of the individual member states, provides the terms “profile” and “profiling” with their first legal definition. They consist of “any form of automated processing of personal data evaluating the personal aspects relating to a natural person, in particular to analyze or predict aspects concerning the data subject's performance at work, economic situation, health, personal preferences or interests, reliability or behaviour, location or movements.” Among the “principles of fair and transparent processing” of personal data, EU regulations now “require that the data subject be informed of the existence of the processing operation and its purposes.”43
The authors of this legislation were aware, however, that the knowledge in profiles is not simply being collected by companies but is also being produced by the individual users themselves. A preliminary remark thus states: “This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity.” Such activity might include, for instance, “social networking.”44 Aside from the fact that this stipulation maintains the fragile boundary between “personal” and “professional” activity online, the permeability of which has engendered many ways of economizing private life in digital culture, this passage does much to underscore the ambivalence of the current concept of the profile. For data protectionists, the superimposed “profile” is never fully congruent with the core of an individual's legally protected “personality.” Profiling is regarded as an external act of attribution, a fact that led Schnabel in 2009 to the conviction that, “as regards profiles, the self-determination of consumers is, from an economic perspective, diametrically opposed to the interests of businesses.”45
This constellation has since changed entirely. By way of their profiles, users of social media now endeavor on a daily basis to depict their own personality in a congruent manner, and in this act of self-determination they provide businesses and advertisers with a constant stream of information. Passive and active access to the format has yielded a remarkable alliance that can no longer be understood in terms of the traditional categories of data protection. In today's profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, self-representation and external control – subjectivization and objectivization – are blending together in an inextricable manner, and we are only gradually beginning to see what new sorts of social and political spheres might arise from this alliance. Though less than 20 years old, in any case, Petra Wittig's suggestion that even the voluntary creation of profiles should be prohibited by law sounds like something from a distant era.
The American psychologist Michal Kosinski has assembled a wealth of evidence regarding the proximity of autonomous creation and external evaluation in today's profiles. Since 2011, he and his colleagues have published a number of articles concerned with making reliable statements about people by applying the methods of personality psychology to Twitter or Facebook profiles. Kosinski's analyses are based on the so-called “big-five” or “five-factor” model, which, since Lewis Goldberg's work in the late 1980s, has been a significant testing procedure in the field. The big-five model divides individual feelings and emotions into five basic traits and aims to determine, by means of a standardized set of questions, the relationship among these traits in the behavior of the person being tested. In this way, it hopes to construct a taxonomy of the human personality. Kosinski's much-discussed thesis is that such knowledge can be obtained far more quickly and with the same level of precision by analyzing profiles on social networks. In his first article, from 2011, he demonstrated with a small cohort of a few hundred users that the most important elements of a Twitter profile – its number of followers, the number of accounts followed by the user, and the number of tweets – were sufficient for determining someone's personality traits according to the five-factor model, and that the conclusions drawn in this manner corresponded to those determined in actual analyses with a probability greater than 90 percent. Twitter profiles, in other words, could be used to make reliable predictions about the personality types of the users in question – whether they are more or less “reserved,” “conscientious,” “agreeable,” “cooperative,” or “sensitive.”46
In the following years, Kosinski and his colleagues expanded the scope of their investigation by inviting, on a Facebook page called “myPersonality,” hundreds of thousands of social media users to take a big-five personality test, and then they compared these results with the users’ profiles. In 2013, they published a study that analyzed the personality types of around 60,000 subjects in light of their “likes” on Facebook – that is, their affirmational responses to comments or to shared products, texts, pictures, and videos. “We show,” the authors claim, “that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, … age, and gender.”47 From the behavior discernible from a user's profile, according to the article, the authors were able to determine with 90-percent accuracy whether the person in question was hetero- or homosexual, and with about 85-percent accuracy whether he or she voted for Republicans or Democrats.
In the abstract of his 2013 study, Kosinski stresses that it is primarily the “easily accessible” nature of the data that makes his method so attractive in comparison with the complex methods of personality analyses conducted by school psychologists.48 Thanks to the ease of acquiring data from profiles, this sort of research, he concludes, “suggests future directions in a variety of areas, including” – especially – the world of “Marketing.”49 This direction would in fact be pursued in a manner that was presumably never taken into consideration by academic psychologists. At the end of 2016, the British firm Cambridge Analytica began to attract widespread media attention for having possibly influenced the US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. The belief was that the company had made use of Kosinski's profile analytics to send individually tailored Facebook messages to certain voters, and that these messages helped to bring about the unexpected result in the election. At an election event in the summer of 2016, Cambridge Analytica's CEO Alexander Nix made the following claim: “If you know the personality of the people you are targeting, you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively with those key audience groups.”50 Following Kosinski's example, the company invited millions of potential voters to participate in a personality test on Facebook, and from the results of this test it determined the focus and content of the messages in question.
In the spring of 2018, it was ultimately revealed that Cambridge Analytica had silently accessed nearly 90 million Facebook profiles between 2014 and 2016 – a scandal that brought Mark Zuckerberg to the floor of the US Senate and incited a long debate between journalists and media theorists about the actual influence of so-called “target profiling” on the outcome of recent elections. Yet, regardless of how deeply the political marketing by Cambridge Analytica and comparable agencies affected the behavior of voters, the fact remains that Kosinski's analyses have shown, with particular clarity, the extent to which the profile oscillates between autonomy and external control. With a rather old-fashioned term of political critique, it would be possible to refer to the activity of target profiling as “voter manipulation.” Regarding the forms of subjectivization in digital culture, however, it is characteristic that this intervention was choreographed by means of the very format which, for a good ten years, most people had considered a sovereign space for self-representation.
The dominant role of the profile in digital culture is also instructive because the profile established a representational form of the self that could be understood as antithetical to the concepts of the subject that prevailed during the early age of the internet. In the mid-1990s, diagnoses of a new media era typically included a great deal of emphatic talk about the self and its novel developmental possibilities within the virtual sphere of the internet. In their discussions of online forms of subjectivization, influential authors at the time such as Howard Rheingold, Sherry Turkle, John Perry Barlow, or Nicholas Negroponte focused on the medium's lack of boundaries and on aspects of masquerading and multiplicity. Referring to role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, for instance, Turkle repeatedly stressed that online identity is “not only decentered but multiplied without limit.”51 The subject of users, she thought, had to be understood through categories such as “difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation.”52 “When we live through our electronic self-representations,” according to Turkle, “we have unlimited possibilities to be many.”53 Howard Rheingold, who coined the term “virtual community” in the early 1990s, likewise made a case that our identities are “fluid” on the internet; he discusses the activity that took place on early networks such as the “Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link,” whose members, like the role players described by Turkle, were registered under nicknames, and thus their identities could be concealed or multiplied.54 The fluidity of the online self is also a central argument of the most prominent manifesto from the early age of the internet, John Perry Barlow's “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which was published in February 1996: “Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.”55 These words were written in response to the Telecommunications Act enacted by Bill Clinton, which stipulated greater regulation and oversight over online content. During the pioneering days of digital culture, in short, the subject was thought to be a fluid and amorphous category.
This attitude was reflected in the spatial metaphors used to describe the internet at the time, including the concept of “cyberspace,” which Barlow had borrowed and redefined from William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. Cyberspace promised to be an egalitarian and immaterial space that was free from state and police intervention – “beyond government control,” as Fred Turner remarked in his book about the rise of digital utopias in California.56 Barlow, who, like many of the movement's pioneering figures, came from the Californian counterculture, associated these fantasies about the unconstrained nature of virtual identities and spaces with LSD experiences during the 1960s and 1970s. He believed that the boundless online world would, like LSD, enable a psychedelic trip – one caused not by synthetic drugs but by information technology: “The computer itself was a new LSD.”57 In Barlow's estimation, the important and utopian quality of this sphere lay in the fact that it could not be delineated and controlled, a characteristic that would give rise to a second spatial metaphor for the internet at the time: the electronic frontier. Just as nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States kept pushing westward, the early users of the internet were constantly entering unmapped territory where the inhabitants could express, according to Barlow's “Declaration,” their “authentic identity.”58
Over the past 20 years, such fantasies about a fluid and multiple self in boundless space have obviously faded away. An entirely different concept – an entirely different genealogy of the internet and its collective subjects – has since taken their place. The profile, which began to appear on online-dating sites and in job-application culture around the same time as Rheingold's, Turkle's, or Barlow's eloquent theories, opposed these dreams of fluidity as a format that is oriented entirely around structure, predictability, and standardization. In the central methods of self-representation and self-perception that have since been established in digital culture, the subject and his or her space exist to be ascertained. To illustrate the gulf between these two concepts, all that is needed is to compare the passionate arguments from the 1990s in favor of the multiple self with the guidelines governing today's largest social network and its 2 billion active members. The section titled “Registration and Account Security” in Facebook's “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” begins with the following injunction: “Facebook users provide their real name and information.” Other “responsibilities” that every member must accept when registering include: “You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook,” “You will not create more than one personal account,” and “You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date.”59
Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has himself stressed that the spectacular success of his business and its triumph over early competitors such as MySpace are in large part due to his insistence on the uniform and unambiguous identity of the site's users. In his interviews with the journalist David Kirkpatrick, which were published in 2010, he interpreted MySpace's indifference to the number and genuine nature of its users’ profiles as a decisive weakness and a target to attack: “MySpace was unconcerned with who you really were.”60 His own flourishing network, in contrast, required from the beginning that each user could only have one profile and that it had to be under his or her real name. “You have one identity,” Zuckerberg repeatedly maintained in the interviews, and he spoke of the “lack of integrity” associated with the multiple and fictitious profiles created on MySpace.61 According to his credo, “You can't be on Facebook without being your authentic self!”62 Of course, the reasons for this insistence on authenticity were more commercial than philosophical, given that, from the outset, the business has been able to provide advertisers with a lucrative supply of real names and addresses. Regarding the conception of humanity in digital culture and the disappearance of the early discourse about the multiple subject, however, this mantra of the “authentic self” represents a threshold: the anonymous or disguised ego has given way to an ego that is readily identifiable. Just a few years after its announcement, Barlow's fluid category of “authentic identity” in cyberspace congealed into something that could not be better suited for police surveillance.
In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner framed the transitional process under discussion between two historical turning points: the campus protests at Berkeley in 1964, where students wore IBM punch cards around their necks to symbolize their powerlessness against the machinery of the university, and the publication of manifestos such as Negroponte's Being Digital and Barlow's “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in the mid-1990s. Turner's main objective was to explore how, within a period of 30 years, information technology was able to develop from a menacing and subject-inhibiting force into a sphere of social utopia and individual liberation. My considerations here about the status of the self in digital culture have described how this transformation has both progressed and regressed in recent years – developments that Turner, who completed his book before the advent of social media, could not have taken into account. For it ranks among the most irritating features of the current relation between subject formation and digital media technology that the promises of freedom declaimed during the pioneering years of the internet continue to provide the ideological basis of all new devices and services (every Apple presentation and every expansion of the sharing culture is an echo of the “virtual community”), while the methods of individualization – as shown by the development of the profile concept – are no longer intended to scatter subjects but rather to arrest them.