Part 1: Foundations — Data, Power, and the Digital Self
"The world is not made of atoms. It is made of stories." — Muriel Rukeyser
Welcome to the beginning.
Before we can discuss who should govern data, what privacy means in the digital age, or how to hold algorithms accountable, we need to establish common ground. What is data? Where does it come from? Who controls it? Why does it matter?
Part 1 answers these foundational questions through six chapters that build progressively from the concrete to the theoretical:
Chapter 1: The Data All Around Us maps the data that permeates daily life — the thousands of data points generated before you finish your morning coffee. You'll learn to distinguish types of data, trace the data lifecycle, and recognize why governance matters.
Chapter 2: A Brief History of Data and Society reveals that the relationship between data collection and power is not new. From ancient censuses to colonial classification systems, from IBM's punch cards to platform capitalism, recurring patterns of data power illuminate the present.
Chapter 3: Who Owns Your Data? tackles one of the field's most contested questions. You'll encounter competing theories — data as property, as labor, as rights, as commons — and discover why none of them alone is sufficient.
Chapter 4: The Attention Economy examines why so much data is collected: because the dominant business model of the internet depends on capturing, measuring, and selling human attention. Dark patterns, engagement optimization, and behavioral surplus are the mechanisms.
Chapter 5: Power, Knowledge, and Data provides the theoretical foundations for analyzing data power, drawing on Foucault, information asymmetry theory, and data colonialism to understand how data systems create and maintain power structures.
Chapter 6: Ethical Frameworks for the Data Age equips you with the philosophical tools — utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, care ethics, and justice theory — to evaluate the dilemmas that arise throughout the rest of the book.
Meet the Characters
Throughout this textbook, you'll follow two students whose perspectives and backgrounds shape how they engage with data governance:
Mira Chakravarti is a 21-year-old junior double-majoring in Information Science and Philosophy. She works part-time in her university's Office of Institutional Research, where she's learning firsthand how data shapes institutional decisions. Her father, Vikram, founded VitraMed, a health-tech startup that will serve as a recurring case study throughout the book. Mira begins as a data optimist — she believes in technology's power to improve lives — and her journey through these chapters will challenge that optimism in productive ways.
Elijah "Eli" Okonkwo is a 23-year-old senior in Political Science and Public Policy, from Detroit. His neighborhood's experience with Smart City sensors and predictive policing has given him a visceral understanding of data power that most textbooks can only theorize about. Eli begins with righteous anger about surveillance and data exploitation — anger that is justified — and his journey will channel that anger into analytical rigor and strategic advocacy.
Their professor, Dr. Constance Adeyemi, is a former investigator at the UK Information Commissioner's Office who now teaches Information Ethics. She asks the questions that don't have easy answers. Her favorite phrase: "What would change your mind?"
Four Themes
Four recurring themes will weave through every part of this textbook. Watch for them:
- The Power Asymmetry — Who collects data, who is collected upon, and who decides?
- The Consent Fiction — When is consent meaningful, and when is it theater?
- The Accountability Gap — When data systems cause harm, who is responsible?
- The VitraMed Thread — How do data ethics challenges compound as an organization grows?
By the end of Part 1, you'll have the vocabulary, the historical awareness, the analytical frameworks, and the ethical tools to engage with every topic that follows. The foundations matter. Build them well.