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Paper Still Has Weight
Humility is the best policy for technological forecasters. If you doubt that, remember those confident predictions of 30 years ago about the coming arrival of the“paperless office.”
The arrival of computers everywhere in the workplace would, we were assured, soon make paper a thing of the past. Bill Gates vision of a computer on every desk has been more or less realized. Yet most of the folks working at those desks are knee-deep in paper. Research suggests our increasing use of paperis due to the introduction of the very digital technology that was supposed wipe it out. The case studies on email in the workplace, for example, show that it can lead to a 40 percent increase in paper consumption—and this doesn’t take into account the amount of paper used to print information from the Internet. There’s a wonderful irony here, because the personal computer—not to mention the laser printer—was invented in a lab set up by a copier company which was worried by all the talk of paperless offices. Our attachment to paper is truly amazing.
An astonishing proportion of email users, for example, prints off their messages and stores them all in filing cabinets. To the technological rationalist this behavior seems irrational. Why store email messages in paper files,which take up valuable real estate and are effectively unsearchable, when you can keep them on a hard disk and effortlessly look through them for keywords and phrases? The answer, of course, is it is the rationalists who are irrational. If people love paper, there must be a reason for it.And there is. It is highly portable, infinitely flexible and embodies very high-resolution display technology, which consumes no battery power. And it doesn’t have to be turned on before you can read it.
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