The Triumph of Profiling. Andreas Bernard

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      Cyberspace and profiles: from the boundless to the captive self

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 СКАЧАТЬ