Systems affect and enable certain kinds and shapes of documents

These effects persist throughout the technological generations.

References

Yates, JoAnne. “From Press Book and Pigeonhole to Vertical Filing: Revolution in Storage and Access Systems for Correspondence.” The Journal of Business Communication (1973), vol. 19, no. 3, July 1982, pp. 5–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/002194368201900301.

Emails have subject lines because of guidelines like the ones put in place in 1913 at the Scovil corporation, specifying that all correspondence needed to focus on a single topic and list that topic at the top of the paper, so they would be easier to file. p. 21

The main advantage of carbon copies was that it kept copies as single sheets of standard sizes, something that wasn’t tenable with tissue paper. p. 15