The Triumph of Profiling

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Andreas Bernard. The Triumph of Profiling

Table of Contents

List of figures

Guide

Pages

The Triumph of Profiling. The Self in Digital Culture

1. Profiles: The Development of a Format

A conceptual history of the profile in the twentieth century

The triumph of the self-made profile

Profiles and the culture of job applications

Constants of external control

Cyberspace and profiles: from the boundless to the captive self

Notes

2. Locations: GPS and the Aesthetics of Suspicion

The history of satellite navigation

On the way to locating individuals

Paradoxes of location

Electronic ankle bracelets

Location-based games

Notes

3. Cavity Searches: Bodily Measurements and the Quantified-Self Movement

Fitbit

Genealogies of self-tracking

Measuring, classifying, discriminating

Introspection and data generation

Lifting the veil

Witnesses for the prosecution

Notes

4. The Forgotten Fear of Registration. The drama of the census

The police as a catalyst of electronic registration

The semantics of the net

The glamour of datafication

Nineteen Eighty-Four from today's perspective

Stigmatization and self-design

Notes

5. The Power of Internalization

Competitive individuality

The governability of the self in digital culture

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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Andreas Bernard

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Weinreich was thus quite precise in choosing the name “SixDegrees” for the first online network of friends. After all, the contingency and frustrating evasiveness of social relations that gave the play its title could now, thanks to new communication technology, be restrained and used productively to at least the second degree. The format for organizing this confounding web of relations was the profile: a simple personal description that quickly and conveniently made every member identifiable to his or her circle of acquaintances. In the age of social media, the notion of the profile implicitly suggests that a con-man pretending to be Sydney Poitier's son would be found out in a matter of seconds. Even in this era of affirmative self-description, that is, the profile can still be useful to the police. The six degrees of separation between any two people, which on the eve of the digitalization of social relations could still drive the plot of a dark tale of deception, are now becoming transparent and traceable.

Although the self-made profile first appeared during the second half of the 1990s on social networks and online dating sites, the format soon emerged in a context that was not truly related to the new medium of the internet. In the genre of job-application manuals, which have been flourishing on the book market in conjunction with the gradual standardization of “job-application culture,” the concept quickly gained enormous popularity. In Germany, the books by Christian Püttjer and Uwe Schnierda have occupied a dominant position in such literature for the past 25 years. By now, the duo has produced more than 60 guidebooks of this sort, with titles such as Confidence in Interviews, Success in the Assessment Center, or The Definitive Job-Application Handbook (their magnum opus).29

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