The “Paperless Office” Is Finally Arriving
When the Internet first arrived, we printed things more and more and more. Then something changed
Remember the “paperless office”?
Back around the second world war, high-tech thinkers started predicting the demise of paper in white-collar workplaces. After all, if computers became ubiquitous and we all used “electronic mail”, then why would we need so many printed memos, letters, and reports? From the 50s up to the 90s, digital prophets from Vannevar Bush to J.C.R. Licklider to Bill Gates proclaimed that paper would eventually go the way of the dodo.
But it didn’t. Quite the contrary: As the office computerized, the use of paper exploded.
In 2002, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper published The Myth of the Paperless Of Office, in which they noted that paper usage in the US grew at a brisk pace in the 80s and 90s, even as computers sprouted all over the white-collar cubicleverse. Indeed, offices that adopted email saw on average a hefty 40% increase in their use of paper.
How to explain this apparent paradox? The first driver, Sellen and Harper observed, was that computers made it easier than ever to author documents and messages — so we created more than ever. The computer propelled a massive uptick in…
