On Personal and Impersonal Data

Abstract

This article historicizes the concept of personal data by turning to a mid-twentieth-century autobiographical encounter with everyday data, E. B. White’s 1945 New Yorker essay “About Myself.” In tracking crucial differences that mark the contemporary quantification of the self as distinct from earlier modes of numerical self-understanding, the author argues that the data presented in White’s essay are information that index an individual within a series of existing schemas, while much of the impersonal personal data of the present are not indexical but statistical, registering correlations with profiles and not the self. The theory of algorithmic governmentality posits a transformation in the possibility of an individual as being represented or captured by their numerical place in the social scheme because of a new era of predictive algorithms and machine-learning analytics that dynamically model social relations based on unobserved patterns of behavior. This epochal shift has released a whole series of changes that have important consequences for self-understanding and the arts and strategies of self-representation, complicating our understanding of the meaning of personally identifying information in the present, as well as the possibilities for self-making in present data surveillance environments.