The Datafication Logics of Social Media Profile-Making

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Lukasz Szulc, who shifts our attention to our digital profiles. Profile making is now ubiquitous in digital culture, especially of course in social networking sites and with the continuing move towards a platformisation of the Internet. Through our increased use of mobile devices they have also become more pervasive.

Profiles are how we write ourselves into digital being: they enable and suggest different ways of presenting ourselves, and foreclose others; and they are deeply enmeshed with the architectures, design, and governance of social media. Through this, social media platforms build certain values into their services, for a range of motivations, and this is likely to have considerable long-term effects.

This can be understood through the lens of the mediatisation of society. This approach captures the longer-term, further-reaching changes of change, and takes into account the logics of social media platforms. This is then also a form of datafication: social media platforms have also become data firms, and social media users are positioned as the producers of such data.

The logic of datafication is to gather as much data as possible, and to connect such data to a particular unit of analysis (most often, an individual user). Profile design and governance encourages such datafication: we encounter the updates of others and place our own profile information and activities at the centre of our own online social media presence. This positions our persona as both an abundant self and an anchored self.

The platforms, in turn, constantly encourage us to post about ourselves, as well as to make further connections by friending, following, liking, commenting, and sharing; in addition, others are connecting with our own profiles, and algorithms further process and connect the information that we and others are providing. Such activities are then also displayed back to the users in the form of social media metrics, leading to a quantification of the self.

This datafied, abundant self is anchored through the process of profile registration: platforms such as Facebook require users to provide a ‘real name’ (an authentic self), of course, even though for mere data analytics this does not make a difference – but this encourages the creation of a singular self that is not fragmented across multiple profiles for different purposes or platforms. This is problematic for users who have a need to keep personal and professional profiles, or other distinct aspects of their identities, separate from each other. Platformisation has led to the creation of metaprofiles across multiple platforms operated by the same company, or even super-metaprofiles that are used as a single sign-on for many different, unrelated purposes.