But my suspicion is that this runs deeper — that data collection is slowly becoming the ideological basis of the self — what we regard as the real self. Data is the authorized way to pursue self-knowledge in the networked society; the other means are suspicious, deluded or outmoded.
I wonder how new this is, or maybe better, how different relationships to data are leading to different forms of the data self. So much of what Foucault writes about is to do with how data structures subjectivity (population statistics and governmentality, physiology and disciplinarity, confessional discourses and sexuality); but it’s certainly possible that these various relationships between data and the self are getting reconfigured by the internet generally, and social networking in particular.
