The Myth of the Paperless Office (November/December 2002 | Volume: 53, Issue: 6)

The Myth of the Paperless Office

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Authors: Frederick E. Allen

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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November/December 2002 | Volume 53, Issue 6

IN 1970 THE FUTURIST Alvin Toffler proclaimed that “making paper copies of anything is a primitive use of machines and violates their very spirit.” Five years later the head of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center began to see the paperless office on the horizon and ventured that in the future “I don’t know how much hard copy I’ll want in this world.”

 

If he’s like the rest of us, he’s still surrounded by a lot of paper, probably more than ever before. We’ve all been hearing about the approach of the paperless office for decades now, but the paper in our lives has only kept increasing. Technologies have emerged one after another to help us do away with what Egyptians first made out of riverside reeds several millennia ago, including electronic datebooks, ever-shrinking laptops, and the never-quite-ready e-book. We all know that paper takes up precious space, can be in only one place at a time, is extremely hard to index or search through, and lacks all the interactivity and linking ability of hypertext; and because we know this, we feel guilty about our continued reliance on it. Why haven’t we been able to kick the habit?

Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper, two British researchers, decided to find out, and they’ve gathered their discoveries as The Myth of the Paperless Office, published by MIT Press. They illustrate the quandary we’re all in by telling of a manager they met at a hightech research laboratory whose office was a flood of stacks of paper—on chairs, tabletops, desks, and surrounding his computers. He had a seemingly miraculous ability to lay hands on any document in the big mess within seconds, but he was an embarrassment to his employer. Every time the head of the company came around, the man had to take all his stacks of paper and hide them in boxes in a closet. This would slow down his work considerably for a week or two. Which raises a question. Was all that paper really a handicap?

It’s easy to think so. We’ve heard plenty about the advantage of computerized information handling, but we never hear about the virtues of paper. Sellen and Harper have identified them. Take how they describe the disposition of papers on a typical desk, perfectly capturing my own messy office and perhaps yours as well: A primary pile of papers, adjacent to the open workspace at the center of the desk and probably next to the phone, contains what they call hot files, documerits to be acted on immediately. Warm files, still active but of less urgency, occupy the periphery, teetering on a corner of the desk or stuck in a desk drawer. Cold files, the great preponderance of documents that don’t need immediate attention, fill file drawers farther away. Meanwhile, that open workspace amid the piles of papers likely has several individual sheets lying about it; other papers may be