Offices look different now than they did a few years ago, which is to say many of them are a lot emptier. Less than 80% of workers over 16 are working entirely on-site as of last year. But, other than humans, something else has disappeared from the modern office space: filing cabinets.

Craig Robertson is a media historian at Northeastern University and author of, “The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information.” He explains how the filing cabinet changed not just the office space, but also how we thought about data.

“Information is a history,” Robertson said, “and the filing cabinet plays an important role in that history because it allows people to understand information as this discrete unit that exists in the world that can be at your fingertips. And so that obviously still lingers on today.”

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