How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person

Data has become increasingly important to how we live, and Colin Koopman's book "How We Became Our Data" explores the emergence of mass-scale record-keeping systems and new data techniques that have led to the creation of the informational person and the informational power we are now subject to. Koopman combines philosophy, history, political theory, and media theory to present an illuminating perspective on how we have come to think of our personhood and how we can resist its erosion.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 272 pages
\n Publication date: 31 May 2019
\n Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
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We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are?

In How We Became Our Data, Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the emergence of mass-scale record-keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. This all culminates in what Koopman calls the informational person and the informational power we are now subject to.

The recent explosion of digital technologies that are turning us into a series of algorithmic data points is shown to have a deeper and more turbulent past than we commonly think. Blending philosophy, history, political theory, and media theory in conversation with thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Friedrich Kittler, Koopman presents an illuminating perspective on how we have come to think of our personhood—and how we can resist its erosion.

\n Weight: 436g\n
Dimension: 154 x 228 x 16 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780226626581\n \n