The Triumph of Profiling. Andreas Bernard

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      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.