The triumph of the self-made profile

      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