The Digital Turn

Chapter 2 traced the rise of the paper self, the moment when identity left the body and became something a stranger could check, file, and believe. Documents made rights portable, names were compressed into index numbers, and societies learned to treat the version of a person held in a record as more authoritative than the person standing in the room. The paper self was powerful, but it was patient. It waited in drawers. It was retrieved at counters, presented at borders, opened at the moment of decision, and then put away. Identity in that era was something you carried until someone asked for it.