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

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 acce...