The Logic of the Filing Cabinet Is Everywhere

Seventeen years ago, just as the periodic cicadas were getting ready to arrive in droves in the eastern United States, Google announced Gmail, an exciting new email service. It had three key features: search, making it easy to find emails; storage, with what was then a mind-blowing 1 gigabyte; and speed, with emails threaded into conversations that ostensibly eliminated the need for cumbersome folders. Today, as the cicadas have seemingly taken over parts of the eastern U.S. once more, Gmail and Google’s G Suite, now used by more than 2 billion monthly active users around the world, still largely operate on these same basic principles.

Google figures only briefly in the , a new book by Craig Robertson, an associate media-studies professor at Northeastern University, but it’s impossible not to think about the little search bars we live with every day while reading it. Like the tape, the filing cabinet was an essential marker of modernization that’s now considered clunky and outdated, with none of the mystique that some objects, such as vinyl records and windup clocks, have acquired over time. But Robertson’s captivating history makes the case that, when the filing cabinet was invented in the 1890s, it represented a