Andreas Bernard – författare

Until fairly recently, only serial killers and lunatics had profiles. Yet today, almost everyone is profiled through social media, mobile phones, and a multitude of other methods. But where does the idea of “profiling” come from, how has it changed over time, and what are its implications? 

In this book, Andreas Bernard examines contemporary profiling’s roots in late-nineteenth-century criminology, psychology, and psychiatry. Data collection techniques previously used exclusively by police or to identify groups of people are now applied to all individuals in society. GPS transmitters and measuring devices are now unconsciously embraced to have fun, communicate, make money, or even find a partner. Drawing perceptive parallels between modern technologies and their antecedents, Bernard shows how we have unwittingly internalized what were once instruments of external control and repression.

This illuminating genealogy of contemporary digital culture will be of interest to students and scholars in media and communication, and to anyone concerned about the power technologies hold over our lives.

This is a short book about the most prominent sign of our times.  The simple # sign is now used so widely that it is easy to overlook the fundamental effects it has had in the structuring of public debate.  With its help, statements are bundled together and discourse is organized and amplified around common buzzwords.  This method enables us to navigate more easily the huge volume of online utterances, but it also increases the risk of leveling statements and extinguishing difference, as exemplified by the #MeToo debate.

Andreas Bernard traces the young and spectacular career of the humble hashtag.  He follows the history of the # sign, documenting its use by Twitter and Instagram, and then examines the most prominent contemporary domains of the sign in socio-political activism and in marketing – two apparently very different fields which are united in their passion for the hashtag. Theory of the Hashtag shines a bright light on a small but pervasive feature of our contemporary digital culture and shows how it is surreptitiously shaping the public sphere. 

This is an ode to the lost golden age of the pinball machine. These vivid, flashing portals of entertainment were mainstays of nearly every bar, pub, and amusement arcade from the 1960s to the 1990s, but today they have all but disappeared. Andreas Bernard, looking back on his coming of age as an avid pinballer, reflects on what the disappearance of pinball machines tells us about the modern transformation of leisure time and public spaces.The demise of pinballing at the end of the 1990s converged with huge social shifts which eroded the distinction between work and leisure. Now we use the same screen to organize both work and leisure, and games have been absorbed by a professionalization of daily life that is impossible to escape. Is our free time, as we know it, really free? Bernard also shows how the replacement of pinball machines by pocket-sized vessels of distraction was accompanied by the ebbing away of social critique.At times nostalgic and lighthearted and at others bitingly astute, this book will appeal to all pinballers, past and present, and to anyone interested in the changing world of culture, gaming, and entertainment.