Profilicity
In 2021 the philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio published a book that may provide new tools for understanding online identity. It is certainly a constantly thought-provoking read, full of clever, timely, and astute analysis: You and Your Profile: Identity after Authenticity. Moeller and D'Ambrosio hold the view that "authentic" identity is an increasingly outdated concept and that authenticity is being largely superseded by a mode of identity formation that they call profilicity. If you recall McLuhan's idea from Lesson 3 that adolescents used to try to find themselves in introspective reading (authentic identity) but by his day they were more interested in how they fit into the world by being "with it," you may get a sense of the direction they are coming from and going in. But McLuhan was writing in an age of passive consumerism of manufactured media. We are beyond being "with it" now; we are it, if we choose to be, and now have to cope with that. Our identities as media artifacts.
The authors introduce the term profilicity to examine a newly prominent way humans may be forming their identities, particularly through the technologies of public online media. They adopt terms that had been used by Lionel Trilling to discuss two previously recognized attitudes toward identity from human history - sincerity and authenticity - and now want to bring attention to their own new concept: profilicity. Roughly, these can be viewed as historical developments, at least in the Western world: first there was sincerity, then authenticity, and now profilicity as the model of identity formation.
Sincerity (the word is used in a somewhat special sense here) is focused on how fully you embody and conform to the social norms attached to your "found" identity. It is typical of closed cultures where social roles are well defined and largely unquestioned. If you were born into a caste in medieval England or India, you would know who you were supposed to be, and "sincerity" involved your genuine attempt to live up to your predetermined role as well as possible. Sincerity is role-based and the ultimate model is the family and its traditional roles in a given culture. Sincere identities are validated by your immediate social circle - your family and/or some other small closely related group, and beyond that by society at large.
"You are a dutiful wife." That is an example of affirming a sincere identity. In some families and communities and in some parts of the world, sincere identity is still very important, or even still the most important mode of identity. But those of us who have grown up in North America have generally instead inherited a notion of "authentic" identity as what is important.
Authenticity emerged as an idea during and after the Renaissance and became central to thinking about selfhood during the "Romantic" period around 1800. In the view of authenticity, your identity is something interior in you, your "true self," who you are when all the social masks are dropped. As McLuhan pointed out, we could associate authenticity with the technology of the book, and privatized reading. Being authentic involves externalizing a true inner self, come what may. It is an individualistic view of human identity, where each of us is unique and our individual inner identity is what makes us valuable (or not...). Our authenticity is confirmed and affirmed by other authentic selves - Moeller likes the example of the "soul mate." Romantic love is certainly part of the same highly individualistic worldview. Again, as with the sincerity model, your identity is confirmed, affirmed, and validated by other people you actually know.
"I respect you so much for who you are inside." That is an example of affirming authentic identity. Be yourself, and to hell with what other people think, except your true friends and admirers. This is the motto of many important rebels who showed us new and better ways of living, but it is also the mantra of Donald Trump. It is an attitude that has reached its societal extreme in the United States, where personal freedom and "doing whatever you feel" has long been treated as the height of self-actualization. But if you grew up in the 21st century, you may already have learned a new way of being you - the globalized, technologically mediated, technically disembodied selfhood of profilicity.
Profilicity is the form of identity formation that the mass media make possible - initially only for published writers or rare public figures and then for broadcast personalities and media celebrities, but now for all of us thanks to the Internet: a public, mediated set of attributes meant to cohere as a persona - or possibly many personas. Your "profilic" identity is affirmed or denigrated or ignored by what Moeller and D'Ambrosio call the general peer, an abstract, essentially imaginary, or possibly algorithmic representation of others you don't personally know. The previous modes of identity - sincere identity and authentic identity - demand the presense of real living peers, but profilic identity demands instead the abstract and mediated general peer of "the public."
That is an example of affirmative profilic identity. The more your identity is defined by your profilicity, the more you are creating/curating it not for physically known peers but for the mass public at large, or an imagined social circle that is larger than the interpersonal scale of everyday life. This kind of identity formation, like the other two, can be very hard work.
It may not be pleasant to conform to a "sincere identity" (dutiful wife), but at least the parameters are usually clear and they're not really up to you or hard to figure out. It's harder to perform "authentic identity," because it seems to be your personal responsibility and it is much harder to get validation/affirmation for. "Profilic identity" is presumably harder still because we can never be affirmed once and for all by "the general peer" (and many of us may feel that is a disturbing goal to even have!).
Though the authors consider the concept of "brand" obsolete, a given profile is a bit like one of your "brands," and the parallels may be worth dwelling on. You are working to "fit" a mulifaceted and fickle public with an identity that will be affirmed. Your identity is a bit of a product that you want them to "buy"; you are "marketing" it, even if you aren't monetizing it. The authors point out how profilicity has many parallels to that giant abstract system where brands themselves matter: the economy. They pun on the Internet jargon of "feeds" and discuss how, like the economy, identity formation may be a ceaseless and accelerating system, endlessly hungry for newness to keep the "social capital" flowing and keep feeding your followers and thereby the sponsor of your identity, you, in a "validation feedback loop."
For the Moeller and D'Ambrosio, profilicity is not really deception (despite the commercial broadcast media on which its conventions are often based). Rather, people "curate themselves" through profilicity. Instead of this meaning that the profiles are 100% authentic renditions of their inner or offline selves or a full reflection of their activity in the embodied world, they mean simply that (ideally) the person who creates the profile genuinely cares about the profile, they are "invested" in it: "Profilicity demands the curation of profiles. The outside is real, and the inside must be truly invested in it, otherwise it is considered a deceptive fraud" (253). The curators of a profilic persona "mean" the identity, or identities. They have chosen to present themselves to us in this way, and are answerable for it.
The Curated Self
It can sound like identity formation under profilicity is the most exquisitely self-conscious of artistic activities. You are the artist and you are the canvas for the pop art exhibit of you.
Self-consciousness is seen by many of us as a modern plague that has gradually trickled down into practically everyone's constant experience. How does identity relate to self-consciousness, particularly in the "profilicity" view of things? A devotee of authentic identity will likely see profilicity as a further remove from lived reality, just as representation itself is, and the mediated images on our phones or tv are something other than lived experience. Moeller and D'Ambrosio discuss how identity formation has come to revolve more and more around "second-order observation" and our attempts to mediate ourselves for the kind of internalized "imagined audience" that a novelist or film maker might keep in mind as they labour on a creative work that is not for anyone real who is right there right now. Instead, it is for "the general peer," meaning "the public" as an abstract entity. With "sincerity" we had to build identity according to our family or immediate social role; with "authenticity" we had to cope with ourselves and our soul mates and other individuals above all; with profilicity we have to think in terms of "the public," or even "the algorithm."
It has sometimes been pointed out that "identity" can only come from identifying with/through someone or something else. In sincere identity formation, we internalize the family or social group as our identification strategy. In authentic identity formation we internalize other individuals, who stand out in their uniqueness and we identify with them (a non-conformist is someone who conforms to the social norms of non-conformity ,-) - the authors characterize this paradox with great jocularity in their chapter on Authenticity). In profilic identity formation, perhaps, we do our best to internalize "the whole world" and imagine we are being seen by them all (surveillance society anyone?). And we largely conceive this "whole world" in the only way we can imagine all the other people we will never actually meet in person: as media consumers, our "audience." We are hoping the whole of humanity (as seers of us) will affirm and validate our profilic identity. You and Your Profile suggests that the dopamine of likes (the validation feedback loop) is not the only reason we become addicted to social media - social media is simply the main way many people have of identitifying themselves in the 21st century, knowing who they are, forming their identities by seeing what gets validated (or not) by their "friends" and "followers" and "audience" on social media.
It seems that we wealthy and privileged postmodernists have the leisure for all this self-consciounsess, forming our identities as "being seen as being seen." When we see ourselves in terms of "second-order observation," we are not seen (physically in the present by living eyeballs that we can also see in return) but instead we are "seen being seen" in the electronic media; and along with this comes our own readiness not to see even present things directly a lot of the time, but to see ourselves seeing them or to see them through our desire to be seen seeing them. As confusing as that sentence might sound, it is just expressing the already completely familiar phenomenon of "selfie culture." The authors use a telling pair of photos, posted by The Theme Park Guy (Stefan Zweiger) in a blog entry called "Smartphone Apocalypse":
This part of Zwanger's image, reproduced in black-and-white on page 38 of You and Your Profile, shows two photos of people watching a show at the exact same spot in a Shanghai theme park, seven fateful years apart. Moeller and D'Ambrosio comment:
Rather than watching the performance directly, the audience in 2017 looks at it through their cellphones, thereby seeing it as it is being seen, or will be seen, by those who will watch the show as posted on a social media account or other online platforms.
[...] As opposed to seeing and being seen directly, second-order observation sees something, or oneself, as being seen. It observes something, or oneself, indirectly, by observing it from the perspective of other observers. Thereby the complexity of the observation is significantly increased—as is shown by the difference between the attention and tension in the faces of the 2017 audience as opposed to the relaxation and joy of the 2010 spectators. In second-order observation , both the object and its observer are taken into account and are simultaneously considered. It is not so easy. (Moeller and D'Ambrosio 2021).
This is the idea of "turning ourselves into media" that I've mentioned a few times before; living our lives in terms of how they will be "socially" mediated for an anonymous (and fundamentally imaginary) audience. Big Brother is watching us watch Big Brother, and we want to be seen watching it. Big Brother is a thumbs up, or rather thousands of them. Hopefully not thousands of thumbs down.
Person and persona
Moeller and D'Ambrosio speak in terms of curating our identity - or typically our multiple identities.
A curator is the person who chooses the pieces for a museum exhibit and how they will be presented to the public. In terms of our online identities, there is an unmediated real person who does the selection and framing and staging, and there is a mediated persona that has been curated for the audience. Even if they appear to be the same, we actually know they are not entirely so.
The relation between persons and the personas they show in public is very similar to that between curators and their exhibits. Importantly, while taking care of an exhibition in such an encompassing way, a curator remains, to use Goffman's term, "back stage." This signals a distinctive distance between what is exhibited on the "front stage" and the exhibitor who works behind the scene. A curator is not an exhibitionist exposing himself. The person is, by definition, distinct from the persona. In this way, as Formilan and Stark highlight, "curation is ultimately a non-authenticity process" (9). Under conditions of profilicity, the difference between persona and person is understood by both person and audience in the same way as the difference between a curator and what she exhibits. Both the curator and the audience are aware of this difference. Despite the attachment and identification involved and acknowledged in exhibitions, authenticity is, in a strict sense, never intended in curatorship. It is therefore nonauthentic but not inauthentic. (Moeller and D'Ambrosio 2021)
Nonauthentic (not about a single inner truth), but not inauthentic (not false or misrepresentative). The curator really does care about the self they are exhibiting (the root of the word "curator" is Latin for "care for"); but it cannot be their full unmediated self. It's the self they curate for exhibition. This also leads Moeller and D'Ambrosio back to the idea of "multiple personalities" becoming the norm, as discussed by Brown at the beginning of this lesson. They talk about "identity virtuosity," which is evidently something like being able to "play" who you are in more than one style, Baroque guitar or heavy metal. They think it makes sense for us to see people's personas as curated versions of themselves. Maybe it's as though the real me, the full me, is something like the Art Gallery of Ontario (or hopefully an even better-stocked museum ,-), and I trot out pieces from the storeroom to create exhibits for different "shows," with different themes and emphases (as curators actually do at the AGO). Those are still really all my holdings, but I have selected and tailored them to different purposes and audiences, for different effects and contexts. Since it is media and public, it is neither insincere nor inauthentic, in their view. Those categories don't apply to profilicity. Nor is it crazy to have multiple online personas that - to a certain extent - don't seem to know what each other is doing. "Their multiplicity and flexibility do not represent a broken self or a shattered ethos but rather a form of identity adapted to highly diverse society."*
Moeller and D'Ambrosio's brilliant and broad-ranging analysis can still leave one with some worries around profilicity as the new way of being human. One worry that they themselves have is around sanity, whether a truly successful always-on profilicity is sustainable for those who try to maintain it as a lifestyle or career. They quote a 2018 article from the Guardian that talks about "a wave of videos by prominent YouTubers talking about their burnout, chronic fatigue and depression" (Parkin 2018, qtd in Moeller and D'Ambrosio, 232). Then there is this strange entity "the general peer." Is the general peer real? Is there anything to be concerned about when the general peer also includes the specific peer-er, the Big Bugbear of surveillance society? Other concerns might be more bluntly political or sociological or moral (Moeller and D'Ambrosio personally subscribe to a form of Taoism that emphasizes a somewhat amoral attitude toward existence). Is the general peer of social media more virtuous or at least more legitimately reflective of real human beings than the general peer of the manufactured media in the 20th century was ("the public" as represented in mass media)? Is it good to be shaping ourselves through seeking "the peer's" affirmation? (Moeller and D'Ambrosio would say it is inevitable, I think. It is no longer possible for technologically advanced people to be merely social, they must now be what one might call "hypersocial" [incredibly this term hasn't been used by a theorist yet! I dibs!! ;-)]: simultaneously social with real present other human beings, virtually social with people we know socially, parasocial for others who don't know us, and not present but (re)presented profilicly to this “general peer"?)
Is "being seen as being seen" in any important way a "less real" way of being, as we move further into hyperreality from embodied life, and do we "have" to do that because of the reality of evolving society/technology/media? How inevitable is profilicity for all the people of Earth? Is there not some relation between profilicity and privilege? Is the whole thing perhaps just more "high school by other means," a neurotic waste of time for a privileged leisure class moving from passive consumption to active production of media and hyperreality - or is it the most important force now shaping human destiny? And so forth. The basic argument resonates with the late 20th century embrace of postmodern detachment and relativism, performativeness and irony, which has come in for some skepticism and critique in the early 21st century. But perhaps this new theory simply starts there and is moving on. The authors certainly make a strong and thought-provoking case that the age of authentic selfhood is on its way out, and that we are wrong to cling to its assumptions instead of recognizing that for better or worse we are already living "under conditions of profilicity," to use one of their favourite turns of phrase.
Even if we accept that we can and must become the masters of our "profiles" - and that these profiles are not false masks or dissociative voices, but rather curated exhibits of true personhood in the brave new world of social media - a further anxiety may present itself for many of us: in a space that is as slippery, unpoliced, and hackable as that which our technology has made for us, how able are we really to control our mediated identity (or identities) out there in the (virtual) world(s)?
* If you would like to explore their concept of profilicity further, you could start with this YouTube video where Moeller discusses Abigail Thorne's coming out video and explains some of the key concepts in the process: Identity After Authenticity: Abigail Thorn's Profile. You will find some other relevant videos on Moeller's YouTube channel, Carefree Wandering, but I preferred to have you read about their ideas. ;-) On his YouTube channel, I asked Moeller some of the questions I concluded this page with hoping to make it into a Q&A video the authors were preparing, but they had already made the video by the time I posted. He did however post some replies right away in response to my comments (what a world we live in!). If you are interested in what he said, see the comments below Existence in the 21st Century | You and Your Profile. What disturbs me about their work is their readiness to treat "Wokeness" as profilic performance (more or less the idea of "virtue signalling" and "performative activism." While the movement may rely on these things in some cases, to treat it that way seems to ignore the question of whether it is right or wrong. For these authors, that seems to be a naive or wrongheaded way of thinking about things, but I don't think I can agree.