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On the October 24th & 27th episode of Spark, we take a look at “vapourwave” — great technologies we’ve been promised for decades, but just never quite arrived.
A fine example is the paperless office. With all the digital alternatives, shouldn’t paper be obsolete by now?
To find out why we still love to use dead trees, Nora interviewed Richard Harper. He’s a senior researcher at Microsoft, and the co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office (which you can preview on Google Books).
Click above to listen to the full interview, or download the mp3.
What role does paper play in your life?
I enjoyed your interview with Richard Harper on the “paperless office”. Back in the 1980′s I was a business analyst and was responsible for cost justifying word processing for a major Canadian insurance company. Part of the justification was moving away from paper reports. Instead, as Richard pointed out, our use of paper went up as people created numerous additional drafts of reports since they could get them turned around faster than in the old manual typewriter days.
Interesting stuff, Kevin. I really enjoyed Richard’s point about separating the paper ‘busy work’ from the tasks that paper really does accomplish better.
actually for my roaming web dev friends, the paperless office is a reality. many high-end web guys/gals i know don’t even own printers.
interesting interview, but I am afraid your stat might be misleading. The per capita use of paper has doubled in the last 30 years, but it could simply mean that more people (on proportion) have jobs that require paper.
To put it in simple numbers, let’s say that in 1975, out of 10 people working, 2 were farmers, 5 had blue-collar jobs and 3 had white-collar jobs. Broadly speaking, only the last 3 used paper. Now, in 2007, there’s only one farmer and 3 blue-collar people left, and 6 white-collar guys (churning out paper). So we have doubled the number of people using paper just by change in workforce.
Of course, it is extremely simplified, but it is to show that raw statistics could be very misleading. We need to know how many more people use paper in their daily job now before concluding of the myth of the paperless office.