Paperless Society: Myths and Reality

Why am I spending time on issues like 'Going Paperless'? What motivates me in doing this? Am I just bored or I got nothing to do?

Well, I got probably two important reasons for immersing myself and spending time doing research and making sense out of this topic on 'Paperless Society'.

The first reason is, I believe that by advocating paperless society we can help reduce deforestation, and in turn, minimize the impact on climate change and global warming, which in turn, will ensure that our children and the generations to come will not worry about rising sea level, extreme wheather conditions, and other unpredictable natural events and disasters.

The second reason is, I am an IT professional. Going paperless definitely improves business processes by eliminating the manual process of printing, transport and motion of printed documents for approval, routing and inspection which to me are all non-value adding activities. It also generates jobs for the IT industry.

I believe that if we are really serious about going paperless, we need to understand its metes and bounds. Go dig information from the digital corridor and find out where we are today and where we want to go in this initiative.

I scanned the digital corridor for information about the myths and realities about Paperless Society and these are what i found out, and i quote:

".... the university of California-Berkeley has found that the volume of information online has tripled during the past three years (though voice and e-mail dwarf the web interms of overall throughput). Among trends noted:

- Paperless Society? The amount of information printed on paper is still increasing, but the vast majority of original information on paper is produced by individuals in office documents and postal mail, not in formally published titles such as books, newspapers and journals.

-The world wide web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections.

- Instant messaging generates about five billion messages a day(759GB), or 274 Terabytes a year.

- Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide. " 1


Another comments on the myths about paperless society:

"The 21st century was supposed to be the beginning of the paperless society..... Brochures, catalogues, and other forms of print advertising have continued in high demand in all aspects of the business world.... The visual and interactive demands of the 21st century consumer ensure that our society wont be paperless for a long time yet". 2


And one more article on the myths about paperless society:

"... The differences between typewriter and computer word processing resulted in an increase in the paper-print load, not a decrease. I saw it up close and personal in typing and printing out military and civilian evaluation reports. With a typewriter-initiated report, the evaluator could and was allowed to correct, initial typos and make additional comments in pen and ink including the carbons. With computer formatting and printing, the striving for a perfect report produced more reprints, correcting typos and editing---sometimes rewriting reports 10-20 times---more paper wasted. The Goal: Perfection." 3


Another statistics on the growth of information:

"The United States produces about 40% of the world's new stored information, including 33% of the world's new printed information. Thirty percent of the world's new film titles, 40% of the world's information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media.

How much new information per person? According to Population Reference Bureau, the world population is 6.3 billion, thus almost 800MB of recorded information is produced per person each year. It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800MB of information on paper.

We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years. " 4


This is the fact about the sales revenue from paper:

"There is a paradox here. With $20.1 billion in sales last year, International Paper is the biggest player in an industry that visionaries long ago predicted would be a dinasour in a paperless society. Well, not only have paper sales grown steadily, but Internaltional Paper has become a power user of the technologies that were supposed to render it obsolete." 5


Another one from Office World News:

"With the electronic revolution in full swing, the main result thus far is an almost exponential increase in the amount of paper generated. In fact, the more high tech we become, the more paper we use. This is because computers help people work faster but people still want the security of a "hard" copy. Because the computer generates so much more work and analysis, it also generates more paper." 6


And from W3Org itself:

"BookMaker believes that the wealth of information on the web will cause more printing to be done, rather than less. Companies spending thousands of dollars publishing Web pages that look compelling and professional on screen. There is a need for consumers of these pages to be able to self-publish these pages in a useful and compelling format, that they can read off-line, or throw into a briefcase and take with them." 7


So the question of whether Paperless Society is a myth? The answer is still a big NO to me. The journey towards a paperless society is inevitable.

It only depends on which road humanity wants to take. Its either in the road where rain forests in the world are gone completely and eventually go paperless; or in the road where we choose to stop cutting tress and eliminate if not reduce our addiction to paper by going paperless. The future is there for us to shape.




References:

1. Communitelligence.com dated May 01, 2007
2. Rob Parker, "Paperless Society? I dont think so.", ArticleOnRamp.com, March 2007.
3. Bonnie Alba, "Not a Paperless Society - Yet", January 2007.
4. Bill Virgin,"It's a brave e-world, but paper still king", Seattle Post - Intelligencer
5. Claudia H. Deutsch,"The Paperless society, Eh?", nytimes.com, September 1998.
6. Office World News, "Whatever Happened to the paperless society?", Proquest Company, Apr 1998.
7. Hal Schectman,"Paperless Society a Myth", W3Org, 1996.