Andreas Bernard - The Triumph of Profiling

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

It is worth dwelling on the fact that Weinreich had given his platform, which he thought would revolutionize the possibilities of social networking and could possibly contain “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individuals,” 27 the name “SixDegrees.” In 1997, this term had a familiar ring to it because it featured in a social-networking thought experiment that had recently gained popularity through the traditional media of theatre and film. In 1990, a play titled Six Degrees of Separation debuted in a small theatre on Broadway. The piece went on to become a big success in the United States and was made into an acclaimed movie in 1993. With the title of his website, Weinreich was thus referring to the popular hypothesis at the time that, through friends of friends, any two people could be linked in six steps or fewer. 28 In John Guare's play and in the film, this experiment is carried out through the example of two married couples in New York, both of whom fall victim to a con-artist claiming to be Sydney Poitier's son and a close friend of their children at Harvard. The rest of the plot follows the couples as they attempt to figure out the identity of the unknown man and his mysterious relationship with their sons and daughters, who claim never to have heard of him before. From today's perspective, the work mostly seems like a case study of how to generate knowledge under pre-digital conditions, for all of the questions that search engines and social media can now resolve with a few clicks – Does Sydney Poitier have a son? Who is part of our children's circle of friends? – have to be answered by the swindled families through protracted consultations with traditional media: by means of an autobiography of Poitier bought at a used bookstore, student yearbooks at Harvard, and ultimately the New York Times , in which a journalist known to one of the couples writes an article about the con-artist's methods.

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

These books and brochures began to attribute an important role to the concept of the profile by the end of the 1990s. In their 1999 handbook Applications and Resumés for College Graduates , for instance, the authors stressed that “lacking a profile” was the most detrimental factor for applicants, and in a section called “The Rules of Persuasion” they advised job-seekers especially to “create an individual profile.” 30 In these early publications, however, the concept did not yet serve as the keyword and foundation of their entire approach to applying for jobs. This changed around the turn of the millennium, when Püttjer and Schnierda trademarked their so-called “profile method” and began to include this term in the titles or subtitles of most of their books. 31 According to Christian Püttjer, their focus on the profile was a response to a media-technical shift in the job market – namely the establishment, around the year 2000, of online job applications – which resulted in the implementation of stricter formal standards and limited the space allowed for narrative elements in covering letters. 32 “The modern requirements for job applications,” or so begins The Definitive Job-Application Handbook , “can only be met by creating a profiled presentation of oneself.” Every stage of a job search is now organized according to this basic category: “Show your profile when making personal contact with potential employers, make sure that it occupies a clear place in your job-application portfolio, present it in phone calls with the businesses you would like to join, and seamlessly integrate it into your interviews.” 33 Across the 550 pages of the book, the term recurs in numerous variations: “qualification profile,” “job profile,” “application profile,” “short profile,” and so on.

Yet how, in Püttjer and Schnierda's estimation, does an “individual profile brimming with informative keywords” have to look in order for job-seekers to “achieve their goal and find a desirable position?” The three “cornerstones” of the profile method, which the authors list at the beginning of every publication, seem rather ambivalent in certain respects. The third point – “trustworthiness” – contains the following exhortation: “Do not distort yourself; your personality is in demand!” And yet this injunction to represent yourself as authentically as possible contradicts the first point, which requires the “precise fit” of applicants and makes the following claim: “The more you cater to the stated job requirements in your application, the more likely you will be to succeed. Adopt the perspective of the HR department.” 34 This dual challenge – the conflict between honest introspection and adapting oneself to suit the needs of others – is perhaps indicative of a fundamental characteristic of the self-made profile: it is a format that simultaneously allows for both the utmost individuality and the utmost conformity.