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 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