Paper, Information, and Identity in 1920s America

In the first half of the twentieth century, the increasing use of documents to record everyday interactions generated information that became the basis of official identification practices. Based on this change, this article makes two arguments: (1) the increased use of documents in identification redefined identity in terms of procedure (systematic recordkeeping), and (2) it made concrete a relatively new conception of information as a “substance” that had presence in the world and was objective. Thus, the objectivity that became central to identification was tied to an object, to paper, that facilitated an understanding that these documents “contained” objective information.