The Triumph of Profiling. Andreas Bernard
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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.
Notes
All references to online sources were last checked on September 3, 2018.1 Richard Bélanger et al., “U-Shaped Association Between Intensity of Internet Use and Adolescent Health,” Pediatrics 127 (2011), 330–5, at 334. For further discussion related to this debate, see the anonymous article “The Mystery of Aurora Suspect's Missing Facebook Account," cnet.com/news/the-mystery-of-aurora-suspects-missing-facebook-account; and Christoph David Piorkowski, “Spurlos im Netz: Wer sich Facebook verweigert, macht sich verdächtig,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (December 21, 2012), 13.2 Danah Boyd and Jeffrey Heer, “Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster,” in Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society, 2006), n.p. See also Danah Boyd, “Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networks,” in CHI 2004 – Connect: Conference Proceedings (New York: ACM Press, 2004), n.p.; and Danah Boyd and Judith Donath, “Public Displays of Connection,” BT Technology Journal 22 (2004), 71–82, at 72. These references to Boyd's essays – as well as references to other works relating to the history of the profile – were brought to my attention by Andreas Weich, whose dissertation on the history of the profile is due to be published shortly. For an overview of some of his findings, see Andreas Weich, “Sich profilieren und profiliert werden: Über zwei Seiten einer Medaille,” in Profile: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge, ed. Martin Degeling et al. (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2017), 37–57.3 Boyd and Donath, “Public Displays of Connection,” 74.4 Boyd and Heer, “Profiles as Conversation,” n.p.5 Eric Partridge and