Society's Addiction to Paper

In 2003, Geoffrey Peters from School of Computing Science (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Canada) worked on a research paper entited "A Society Addicted to Paper - The Effect of Computer Use on Paper Consumption". This is what he concluded and I quote:

"The concepts of the “paperless office” and the “paperless society” are fanciful envisionments of technology promoters – they are ideals which are interesting to consider, but are unlikely to ever be realized. Statistics show that both paper consumption and computer usage are increasing in Canada, and that there is no obvious trend to a reduction in paper consumption due to computer use.

But this discussion is somewhat limited in scope: documented examples from Japan show that some companies have decreased their paper consumption by 30-50 percent as a result of new information technology.9 And on the other end of the spectrum, electricity has not yet reached some two billion people, a third of the world's population."

Take note that in Japan he said, some companies have decresed their paper consumption by 30-50% as a result of information technology.

Then he presented the advantages of paper over that of the computer documents. Here i quote:

"Besides being relatively inexpensive, and easily accessible, paper still has several advantages over electronic based mediums.

The first is tangibility – for important documents such as contracts, paper can be signed and have legal binding. Paper documents can be annotated and edited by hand, and passed on to other readers who can add their comments. Although new features in word processing software allows for a similar kind of collaboration and review of changes, the paper based process is still more intuitive for many people.

While electronic documents can only be viewed on the limited screen space of most monitors, actual printed papers can be easily spread across a desk, allowing a person to quickly switch between documents and pull out important sections without navigating confusing task bars or menu bars.

The second advantage is versatility: paper has very high resolution, can display thousands of typefaces, does not “crash”, cannot be accidentally erased, and can contain built-in hyperlinks such as tables of contents, page references, and indexes.

Because of the usefulness and advantages of paper, and the ease of consumption provided by printers and photocopiers, it is likely that paper consumption will remain at high levels for many years to come. Of course, technological innovation does not stop either, when even now, inventors are working on “paper-like” substances whose content can be electronically altered in a matter of seconds. Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the story of paper has yet to be written."

I will continue my discussion on man's behavior towards the use of paper tomorrow. I feel sleepy.