Profilicity and Characterization

Profilicity, as Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D'Ambrosio argue in their book You And Your Profile, is the contemporary identity technology being used in the western world. It leverages constant curation to build a public profile to commit oneself to. This is something that’s neither inherently good or bad.

Taking profilicity into consideration I wonder how easy it is to fall into becoming a characterization of oneself. As one receives likes and comments over particular posts trying to replicate receiving the affirmations is a slippery slope. Over time doing this can create a Baudrillard type hyperreal feedback loop. Here the influence of likes becomes the identity that is adopted by the individual. If one is able to achieve popularity then, without realizing, it’s easy for one to become a mere character of what they originally were striving for.

This kind of feedback already happens in personal interactions of course, but the profile based response offers an abstraction that not possible with physical interactions.

And now a story:

I have a friend I used to work with named Curtis. He was a boxer. Whenever our boss' boss, Dave, from out of town would visit he would always ask Curtis how the boxing was going. It was almost as if there wasn't anything else to Curtis. Dave tended to associate people with simple facts he learned about them and we joked that Curtis only looked like a pair of boxing gloves to Dave.

In the world of profilicity it's possible for thousands, if not millions, of people to do what Dave did to Curtis. If someone over uses the identity technology of profilicity though, they could easily end up internalizing it and become the characterization.