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 Henry C. Wyld, eds., Webster Universal Dictionary: Unabridged International Edition (New York: Harver, 1968), s.v. ‘profile’ (p. 1163).6 Rossolimo's study was never translated into English. The quotation here is translated from the German edition: G. I. Rossolimo, Das psychologische Profil und andere experimentell-psychologische, individuale und kollektive Methoden zur Prüfung der Psychomechanik bei Erwachsenen und Kindern (Halle an der Saale: C. Marhold, 1926), 8.7 Karl Bartsch, Das psychologische Profil und seine Auswertung für Heilpädagogik: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der psychischen Funktionen des normalen und abnormalen Kindes, 2nd edn. (Halle an der Saale: C. Marhold, 1926), 3.8 The quotations are from ibid., 60, 73; and Fritz Giese, Psychotechnisches Praktikum (Halle an der Saale: Wendt & Klauwell, 1923), 40.9 Louis Gold, “The Psychiatric Profile of the Firesetter,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 7 (1962), 404–17. On the “mad bomber” and the role that psychoanalysis played in solving the case, see James Brussel, The Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist (New York: Grove Press, 1968).10 Richard Ault and James Reese, “A Psychological Assessment of Crime: Profiling,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 49 (1980), 22–5, at 22.11 Russel Vorpagel, “Painting Psychological Profiles: Charlatanism, Coincidence, Charisma, Chance, or a New Science?” The Police Chief 3 (1982), 156–9, at 156.12 Ault and Reese, “A Psychological Assessment of Crime,” 24. For a highly similar list, see Vorpagel, “Painting Psychological Profiles,” 159.13 Gold, “The Psychiatric Profile of the Firesetter,” 404, 416.14 Ault and Reese, “A Psychological Assessment of Crime,” 25.15 Anthony Rider, “The Firesetter: A Psychological Profile,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 49 (July 1980), 7–17, at 7.16 On the number of cases in the United States, see Vorpagel, “Painting Psychological Profiles,” 159. Regarding the first criminal profile in Germany, see Cornelia Musolff, “Täterprofile und Fallanalyse: Eine Bestandaufnahme,” in Täterprofile bei Gewaltverbrechen: Mythos, Theorie und Praxis des Profilings, ed. Cornelia Musolff and Jens Hoffmann (Heidelberg: Springer, 2006), 1–23, at 12.17 On the history of registering psychiatric patients and on the development of documentary practices in various hospitals during the nineteenth century, see Ali-Reza Ipektschi, “Ärztliche Aufzeichnungen über Patienten im Allgemeinen Krankenhause in Hamburg in der Zeit von 1823–1888” (doctoral diss.: Universität Hamburg, 1983); Brigitte Bernet, “Der Fall des psychiatrischen Formulars,” in Zum Fall machen, zum Fall werden: Wissensproduktion und Patientenerfahrung in Medizin und Psychiatrie des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Sibylle Brändli et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2009), 62–91; Volker Hess, “Formalisierte Beobachtung: Die Genese der modernen Krankenakte am Beispiel der Berliner und Pariser Medizin,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 45 (2010), 293–340; and
