The Triumph of Profiling. Andreas Bernard
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This constellation has since changed entirely. By way of their profiles, users of social media now endeavor on a daily basis to depict their own personality in a congruent manner, and in this act of self-determination they provide businesses and advertisers with a constant stream of information. Passive and active access to the format has yielded a remarkable alliance that can no longer be understood in terms of the traditional categories of data protection. In today's profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, self-representation and external control – subjectivization and objectivization – are blending together in an inextricable manner, and we are only gradually beginning to see what new sorts of social and political spheres might arise from this alliance. Though less than 20 years old, in any case, Petra Wittig's suggestion that even the voluntary creation of profiles should be prohibited by law sounds like something from a distant era.
The American psychologist Michal Kosinski has assembled a wealth of evidence regarding the proximity of autonomous creation and external evaluation in today's profiles. Since 2011, he and his colleagues have published a number of articles concerned with making reliable statements about people by applying the methods of personality psychology to Twitter or Facebook profiles. Kosinski's analyses are based on the so-called “big-five” or “five-factor” model, which, since Lewis Goldberg's work in the late 1980s, has been a significant testing procedure in the field. The big-five model divides individual feelings and emotions into five basic traits and aims to determine, by means of a standardized set of questions, the relationship among these traits in the behavior of the person being tested. In this way, it hopes to construct a taxonomy of the human personality. Kosinski's much-discussed thesis is that such knowledge can be obtained far more quickly and with the same level of precision by analyzing profiles on social networks. In his first article, from 2011, he demonstrated with a small cohort of a few hundred users that the most important elements of a Twitter profile – its number of followers, the number of accounts followed by the user, and the number of tweets – were sufficient for determining someone's personality traits according to the five-factor model, and that the conclusions drawn in this manner corresponded to those determined in actual analyses with a probability greater than 90 percent. Twitter profiles, in other words, could be used to make reliable predictions about the personality types of the users in question – whether they are more or less “reserved,” “conscientious,” “agreeable,” “cooperative,” or “sensitive.”46
In the following years, Kosinski and his colleagues expanded the scope of their investigation by inviting, on a Facebook page called “myPersonality,” hundreds of thousands of social media users to take a big-five personality test, and then they compared these results with the users’ profiles. In 2013, they published a study that analyzed the personality types of around 60,000 subjects in light of their “likes” on Facebook – that is, their affirmational responses to comments or to shared products, texts, pictures, and videos. “We show,” the authors claim, “that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, … age, and gender.”47 From the behavior discernible from a user's profile, according to the article, the authors were able to determine with 90-percent accuracy whether the person in question was hetero- or homosexual, and with about 85-percent accuracy whether he or she voted for Republicans or Democrats.
In the abstract of his 2013 study, Kosinski stresses that it is primarily the “easily accessible” nature of the data that makes his method so attractive in comparison with the complex methods of personality analyses conducted by school psychologists.48 Thanks to the ease of acquiring data from profiles, this sort of research, he concludes, “suggests future directions in a variety of areas, including” – especially – the world of “Marketing.”49 This direction would in fact be pursued in a manner that was presumably never taken into consideration by academic psychologists. At the end of 2016, the British firm Cambridge Analytica began to attract widespread media attention for having possibly influenced the US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. The belief was that the company had made use of Kosinski's profile analytics to send individually tailored Facebook messages to certain voters, and that these messages helped to bring about the unexpected result in the election. At an election event in the summer of 2016, Cambridge Analytica's CEO Alexander Nix made the following claim: “If you know the personality of the people you are targeting, you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively with those key audience groups.”50 Following Kosinski's example, the company invited millions of potential voters to participate in a personality test on Facebook, and from the results of this test it determined the focus and content of the messages in question.
In the spring of 2018, it was ultimately revealed that Cambridge Analytica had silently accessed nearly 90 million Facebook profiles between 2014 and 2016 – a scandal that brought Mark Zuckerberg to the floor of the US Senate and incited a long debate between journalists and media theorists about the actual influence of so-called “target profiling” on the outcome of recent elections. Yet, regardless of how deeply the political marketing by Cambridge Analytica and comparable agencies affected the behavior of voters, the fact remains that Kosinski's analyses have shown, with particular clarity, the extent to which the profile oscillates between autonomy and external control. With a rather old-fashioned term of political critique, it would be possible to refer to the activity of target profiling as “voter manipulation.” Regarding the forms of subjectivization in digital culture, however, it is characteristic that this intervention was choreographed by means of the very format which, for a good ten years, most people had considered a sovereign space for self-representation.
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: