The Generic Person: Personalization in Digital Culture, Healthcare and Data Science

We ask who—or what, and how—is the person of personalization. Exploring personalizing practices across the domains of digital culture, healthcare and data science, this open access book argues that they re-articulate relations between economy, politics and culture. Contemporary investment in big data, increasing computational power and ‘real-time’ analytics have made participation in a culture of personalization almost impossible to avoid. We must declare, measure and share our personal data in order to carry out many activities. ‘People Like You’ are simultaneously one and many: a group, a category, or a generic emerging from the mapping of publics onto populations. Focusing in-depth on case studies in digital culture, health care and data science, this book identifies common features of personalizing practices to evaluate their significance for conceptions of the person. We explore three features: the use of tracking techniques; the formation of relations of likeness, resemblance or similarity on the basis of practices of liking or preference; and new forms of contextualizing persons in what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to as the “default social.” This book explores the implications of these techniques for the stratification of populations, processes of inclusion, exclusion and belonging, and the assetization of data, and shows how they combine to create to create new emphases on the individual, dividual and generic person. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.