A User Profile is supposed to digitally represent one’s identity , but it is forming and constructing the individual, particularly in the online world. Moreover it provides a template for exercise of control between corporation and their users and among users themselves. Outside the corporate definition framework one can see that user profiles are attached to the concepts of customisation, authentication, identification and engage the individual in an endless process of rules accepting.
A User Profile is a linguistic construction that mediates a social construction, one’s identities, but also the choices of the individual although they are template choices, which shows that our user profiles enforce a controlled curation of identity.
User profiles are supposed to represent oneself in the digital and networked context. But they construct the person and not just represent it. They produce a self that can be organised and remotely accessed. They algorithmically render subjects as objects by reconstructing them field by field through data entering and manipulation of the collections created.
User profiles mediate the human becoming in expanded information societies. Restricted from protocols, archived, strategically connected, unified even through multiplicity. Creating a coherent identity through fragments.
Customisation, authentication, identification engage individuals with restrictions limitations and obligations to an unlimited template culture.
Geert Lovink wrote that luckily there is no true self. Databases and profiles create a self where a self doesn’t exist. A self constructed out of information.