The Triumph of Profiling

The Self in Digital Culture

By: Andreas Bernard, Valentine A. Pakis (Translator)

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Paperback | 31 May 2019 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
200 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.5 x 13.8 x 1.8

Paperback

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Until fairly recently, only serial killers and lunatics had profiles. Yet today, most of us will have a profile as users of social media, and even by using the tracking capabilities on our smartphone. But where does the idea of "profiling" an individual come from, how has it changed over time and what are its implications?
In this book, Andreas Bernard shows how contemporary profiling and quantification have their roots in methods developed in criminology, psychology and psychiatry at the end of the nineteenth century. Techniques for collecting data which were long used exclusively by police or to identify groups of people are now being applied to everyone who uses a smartphone or social media. GPS transmitters and measuring devices installed on bodies are no longer just instruments for tracking suspected criminals or patients, but unconsciously embraced as a way having fun, communicating, making money, or even finding a partner. Drawing perceptive parallels between modern technologies and their antecedents, Bernard demonstrates the way in which we have unwittingly internalized what were once instruments of external control and repression.
This illuminating genealogy of contemporary digital culture will be of great interest to students and scholars in media and communication, as well anyone concerned about the power technologies hold over our lives.

Industry Reviews

“How did surveillance technologies evolve from a sinister past in the panopticon prison or the state police to a contemporary scenario where tracking apps run ubiquitously on the mobile phones of billions of people? In this engaging cultural history of measurement and quantification technologies, Andreas Bernard shows how the technology of profiling migrated from criminology into mainstream use, and how the Web changed from a mythology of mobility and boundlessness to one of location and fixity. Have we fulfilled the dreams of totalitarian governments? Or does today's infrastructure facilitate some other, new form of society?”
Alexander R. Galloway, author of The Interface Effect

"A valuable commentary on modern digital life."
Financial Times Advisor

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