Craig Robertson

“Gender-bending fashion made it harder for border officials to identify someone as male or female,” said Craig Robertson, a professor of communication studies at Northeastern University who wrote a book about the history of the American passport. “I sometimes joke David Bowie caused M/F sex markers to be added to the passport.”

Google figures only briefly in the The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, 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.