The Filing Cabinet

Metadata

• Author: [[placesjournal.org]]
• Full Title: The Filing Cabinet
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://placesjournal.org/article/the-filing-cabinet-and-20th-century-information-infrastructure/

Highlights

• The filing cabinet contributed to the rise of a popular nontechnical understanding of information as something discrete and specific. Critically, it illustrates the moment in which information gained an identity separate from knowledge, an instrumental identity critical to its accessibility. In its separation from knowledge, information was granted authority based on a set of ideas and practices that limited interpretation; in contrast, a subject, someone who “knows” underwrites the authority of knowledge.
• I don’t want to over-stress the significance of the coincidence — but it does capture the ways in which the concepts of “information overload” and “information management” have shape-shifted over time. A century ago, the leading symbol of orderly information management was the filing cabinet; by the turn of the millennium, it was Google search. In the comic strip, Mr. Google sabotages the filing system by spilling papers out of their “proper” locations. This results in a disorganized pile of papers — just the sort of pile (i.e., the web made up of pages) that Google promises to organize, via page rank, and to allow us to access easily. The chaos Mr. Google creates is the chaos Google promises to manage. The filing cabinet and the search engine are both organizing principles for the capitalist management of information, both promising access to vast stores of information at the touch of our fingertips.