午后咖啡unit01 The Weight of Paper 紙的分量

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The arrival of computer everywhere in the workplace would, some technological forecasters predicted, soon make paper a thing of the past.

And guess what? Bill Gate’s 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. In fact, sales of the stuff are growing.

Research from a new book, “The Myth of Paperless Office” suggests our increasing use of paper is due to the introduction of the very digital technology that was supposed to wipe it out.

The case studies on e-mail in the workplace, for example, show that it can lead to a 40% rise in paper consumption—this does not take into account the amount of paper used to print information from the Internet.

Xerox’s core business involved paper, and it was understandably alarmed by the prospect of its going out of fashion. So the research center invented the computing and printer technology that made sure it didn’t. Those Xerox executives knew what they were doing.

But our attachment to paper is truly amazing. An astonishing proportion of e-mail users print off their messages and store them in filing cabinets. Organizations that used to print many documents for meetings now circulate them electronically via their intranets. But those attending meetings generally turn up with heaps of paper hot from the nearest laser printer.

Why store e-mail messages in paper files, which take up valuable space and are effectively unsearchable, when you can keep them on a hard disk and effortlessly look through them for keywords? Why print off bulky documents whose only fate is to be discarded after the meeting is over?

If people love paper, there must be a reason for it. And there is. It is highly portable, infinitely flexible, and consumes no battery power. And it doesn’t have to be turned on before you can read it.

The mystery is not that people use so much paper, but that they don’t use even more of the stuff. The problem with technological predictions is that they are always solution-driven. “Technology is the answer” is their underlying misdset. Now what was the question again? It’s foolish—and here is the hard copy to prove it.