The File and the Person
Article by Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
A file offers a person in a manageable form. There are dates, decisions, summaries, and perhaps a short account of an incident. A stranger can open it and begin to form a view without meeting anyone involved.
This is necessary work. Institutions cannot rely entirely on memory, and people should not have to retell an experience whenever responsibility changes hands. A good record can preserve an inconvenient fact when recollections become convenient.
But recording involves selection. An event has to be given a beginning and an end. Context must be included or omitted. A sentence becomes a description, and later readers may forget that somebody chose its words.
Consider the difference between recording that a person did not attend and recording that they asked to participate by another method. Both statements might describe the same episode. They invite different inferences about willingness, however. The record has begun to shape the decision before the decision-maker reaches the evidence.
The solution is not to distrust every file. It is to keep the record open to correction and to distinguish observation from interpretation. A date can establish that a message arrived. It cannot, by itself, establish the motive behind it.
Institutional memory should remain capable of learning. A correction should travel with the account it corrects, rather than resting in a separate folder that nobody knows to request. Otherwise an early misunderstanding acquires the endurance of a fact.
The file will always be smaller than the person. Fair treatment begins when that necessary reduction is recognised as a limitation rather than mistaken for completeness.