While information technology has recently become a popular concept, its lineages predate its computer associations. One of its key components – its publicness – emerges in the long nineteenth century, and statistical undertakings like censuses are emblematic of that shift. This paper will argue that people's willingness to be counted, their desire to be part of the larger unit (in this case the British nation) is one of the central factors in the rise of IT. In order to explore this issue, I will illustrate how people who were taking the census in the nineteenth century dealt with it; both the enumerators (the actual people who went door to door picking up the forms) and the enumerated (those filling in the forms).
Benjamin Disraeli famously opined that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics;” but this judgment (if we are to take it seriously) was not the rule in nineteenth century Britain. Examination of events like the general censuses demonstrates a high level of interest in, and weight placed upon, what can be seen as numerical indices of national identity. Though recent historiography has moved well beyond the attack on the validity and reliability of public numbers per se, questions of what such statistics actually mean, what the numbers themselves reflect about society, continue to frame a large portion of the historiography. In engaging with this literature, the paper argues for the importance of the self-disciplining aspect of counting yourself as part of modern citizenship. I suggest the importance of seeing census taking as not simply a top down procedure, something which was done to the general population by a central bureaucracy, but as a process which depended upon the active involvement of those being counted. At the same time, I hope to illustrate that the process by which information is gathered is as important as how that information is deployed.