Bunny Blog

I remember reading, a couple of years ago, some commentary from Kevin Drum who had worked for several years at a company hellbent on bringing about the paperless office. His eventual conclusion was that there would never be a paperless office. That, in fact, the more documents that you could generate solely on the computer, the more things a bunch of people would all separately print out. The paperless office generated more paper, not less.

Yet still, the idea of a paperless world persists. I love books, the smell of yellow paper and old glue, the look of a fine bookshelf, but here comes Kindle, and who knows what I’ll be reading on the train next year? Then i stumbled upon this delightful paper (of the scholarly, not physical, breed) - Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal (it’s long, but you can download the pdf here). It’s good stuff, and makes some interesting points…

• Paper is an information technology. Arguably the first information technology (sure, sure, writing predates paper, as does speech), and certainly the one that made so many other things possible. But stop for a second and think about a sheet of paper as the internet of its day. Kinda neat, huh?

• Paper breeds concentration. It’s true. I print out long documents to read all the time, and while I tell myself that its to save my eyes a little monitor strain, it really does help me concentrate. No IMs, distracting hotlinks, or multitasking. I don’t think I’ve ever read a contract on the screen. The desire to take a break for The Comics Curmudgeon would be irresistable. If you felt the urge to click that link, you just proved the point.

• Paper is no longer thought of as an original, but rather an interface, another way for digital media to get to your eyes. You print a “copy,” and toss it when you’re done. The original live son the computer, but you still use paper as part of the chain.

All good stuff. Almost as important, losing paper will be a huge blow to the cinematic arts. As boring as it is to see danger and tension reduced to the progress bar on a laptop, imagine a world without passed notes, cluttered piles on a desk (to indicate character!), or a sheaf of papers tossed into the wind. It could happen, but things will get a lot more sterile in the movies.

And that brings us to the sci-fi reasons. We will never get rid of paper - of hard copies - because if we do then SkyNet, Tyler Durden, or whoever hated Sandra Bullock in The Net can erase our identities, steal our money, invalidate our contracts, and have us all forcibly sterilized with shocking ease. Actually, I suspect that won’t stop us, but after it happens once we’ll wise up and start keeping backups. “Whew,” we’ll say, “that was a close one. Does anybody remember how to set up this printer?”

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