Are you paperless yet ?
When we think about document, paper comes to mind to most of us. You probably guess by now I find this to be quite a restrictive view, but that’s a way of life.
But do you remember all that fuss around the “paperless office” many years ago ?
The first prediction of the paperless office was actually introduced in an article in Business week in 1975 on “The Office of the Future”. It became a buzzword in the 1980s. It coincided with the advent of the Personal Computer, and the hope that all documents could be processed electronically, and that paper would become irrelevant.
And has paper disappeared ? Not at all. Actually, until a couple years ago, paper consumption was still increasing, soaring to extremely high levels. And, although we are now more “conscious” of the way we use paper and its sustainable development and environment impacts, paper consumption is relatively stable, still growing slowly in general in some domains but decreasing in certain domains.
Why has paper stayed around ? Because it has key benefits. Although it has been advantageously replaced by digital documents for data-intensive tasks such as search and retrieval of information, data analysis, mass distribution, business process and transactions, paper still keeps an edge because of its affordances.
Paper continues to predominate in activities that involve knowledge work, reading and collaboration. Paper is becoming a more temporary medium as people print, use and discard documents rather than keeping everything they print. Paper has become a display medium for human collaboration. In the myth of the paper less office, Sellen and Harper claim, “we are not headed towards offices that use less paper but rather towards offices that keep less paper (Sellen, Abigail J. and Richard H. R. Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2002) p. 209.
So will paper disappear someday ? It might, but not before a suitable replacement can be found as a “physical” artifact of a document, with the same affordances. And we are not there yet…
I see the convergence of a few trends that may drive “paperless”
1) The emergance of hand-held (or even laptop) that are always connected. As long as you can get on-line, and to your archive (google docs?) you can find what you need.
2) GenY: The people growing up that are used to emailing their final papers to professors. It was never printed.
3) Regulations: There is a business desire to keep things electronic, and to move to electronic processes.
4) Information Conent is arriving in smaller and smaller snippits. I print long documents, but very rarely an e-mail, never a chat session. If you only have to read and process a paragraph, why print?
You’re right - another trend that might help drive that is also the increasing awareness that paper is a resource that needs to be used responsibly, as it has environmental implications.
Although I think there are many usages for which paper has a unique affordance, for which the electronic document will be a poor replacement. It’s only when (enhanced) e-paper or technologies with similar affordances that we’ll really see paper disappear.
[…] the paperless life. We’re still wandering in the desert. As Francois Ragnet of Xerox notes in his Future of Documents blog, paper has not disappeared because it has certain “affordanaces” that make it both useful […]
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