REPLACING PAPER

Posted on February 14, 2004 by Dave Pollard

paperFor the second time in a month, we have a new innovation designed to replace paper. Two weeks ago I wrote about Toshiba’s new erasable paper. And yesterday, the Washington Post described the steps several organizations, led by Xerox spinoff Gyricon, are taking to develop electric paper, a flexible, ultrathin, rollable, plastic, electronic display medium which can be repeatedly imprinted using a pocket-sized cylindrical device.

Last July I covered a Malcolm Gladwell article on The Social Life of Paper. In that article, Gladwell laid out three “affordances” of paper that electronic equivalents will have to match if they hope to replace it:

  1. spacial flexibility: easy to move around, sort, organize and prioritize in a tangible, physical, humanly ideosyncratic way, even before the author/user has decided if/how to categorize it (so it can be filed)
  2. tailorability: easy to annotate in multiple, personal ways, without inexorably defacing the original, thus suiting itself to collaborative effort
  3. browsability: easy to skip ahead, and back and forth to study two or more sections or passages in parallel

He could have added:

  1. affordability
  2. legibility, under different light conditions
  3. ease of use, and re-use

Gladwell believes that messy desks and offices are simply exploiting paper’s ability to facilitate personal, flexible organizing of information, each document “a contextual clue to an unresolved idea” and that filing cabinets (which have a lot in common with PC content management systems) offer no such flexibility and are merely “final resting places for documents that are unlikely thereafter ever to see the light of day again”. I think most of us would agree that ‘finding stuff’ in cabinets and hard drives is a frustrating, inefficient, unintuitive, and often futile process. We might even agree with Gladwell that the stuff we keep on paper is not knowledge itself but rather ‘support for the knowledge that resides in people’s heads’.

Neither of the new inventions — erasable paper and electric paper — meet the six critical criteria bulleted above — yet.

The challenge to replacing paper is as awesome as the benefits that would come from doing it — a huge reduction in trees cut down, waste in landfills, and polluting chemicals and processes. My guess is that no one magic product will do it, and the problem will need to be parsed: There are four main uses of paper, which, in decreasing order of landfill volume are:

  • newspapers, magazines and other mass media products
  • disposable papers for cleaning and hygiene
  • documents
  • packaging

Rather than a futile attempt to replace paper documents, the most complex, varied and difficult of the four applications, I think the technology innovators should be focusing on the other three.

What would it take before you would replace paper, in each of these four applications, with a high-tech equivalent? Can you see it happening in your lifetime?

And since my new business Meeting of Minds is developing a paper on Personal Content Management, I could also use your advice on how all your personal information — the ‘stuff’ on your desk, in your rolodex and filing cabinets and datebook and blog and accordian files and ‘My Documents’ folder, and on your refrigerator door — might be seamlessly and intuitively aggregated and integrated into a versatile schema of ‘My Information’. Not a taxonomy, mind you. A schema — an organizing mechanism.

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2 Responses to REPLACING PAPER

  1. Marijo says:
    February 14, 2004 at 10:43

    I definitely use the pile of papers on my desk as a sort of flexible to-do list. Each page or packet represents a different task which has to be completed, and I can re-arrange or add to the pile as priorities shift. There’s no reason why I couldn’t do this all with e-mail documents, I suppose, except that that’s not what mostly comes to me from other offices or departments. My file drawers also work very hard throughout the day; I keep information about resources for clients in the drawers, and new info usually come in on paper. It’s easier to drop it in the drawer than to copy data in the computer, although I would like to have a database of resources which could be added to or updated by any of the therapists or case managers. No one has time to do the input, however, and I suspect that it would rapidly go out of date for the same reason. I’ve heard the hemp people suggest that, becasue hemp grows faster, it makes a better ingredient for paper than trees, which might be worth investigating. But that wouldn’t solve the landfill or pollution problems, would it.

  2. Dirtgrain says:
    February 14, 2004 at 21:35

    The hardest thing for me would be to give up paper-page filled books for some sort of e-text book. There is something so ingrained in me, so sentimental. Can you curl up in bed with an e-text book? Can you enjoy reading an e-text book while sitting under a tree? It hurts my nerves to consider it.For me, an e-text book must be easy on the eyes. The same goes for e-paper. It must offer a different experience to the glaring computer monitor. I have read paper-page books for hours and hours–even entire days–without the eye fatigue and weariness that I get from an hour at the computer.I thought of an e-text book that would use “Etch-a-Sketch” technology (okay, so it’s a primitive toy) to print out a page at a time. This would eliminate the backlighting that glares out from the screen. My reading habits require that the light is external of the book that I’m reading.The schema adjustment for me would involve a change in the role of place in how I organize things. My memory is often triggered by places. When I can’t find something, I just move from place to place in my classroom or house until I find it or until my memory of its location kicks in. Finding something that I have written eight years ago in some ways is easier if it is a hard copy. If it’s on the computer, and I don’t remember its file name or location, I may never find it (keep in mind that I haven’t organized my hard drive so well, but even if it were well organized, finding a document can be torturous).Visual details are also significant. Electronic documents all look the same on the computer screen. But visual details of handwritten things somehow help me in searching for them (if, say, they are in a binder full of other handwritten pieces). The same is true of books. I can find a book on my bookshelves, without remembering the title or author, by simply looking for the color or patterns that I remember are on the book’s binding.To be sure, computer search functions render the place and image ideas moot. But there will be a change in the way I store things in my memory.Lastly, when you emphasize “schema,” it makes me feel again that the ever-increasing role of digital technology in our lives is turning us into digital people. To work more efficiently on the computer, I must think more like a computer. Is this changing me? Have you written about this effect before?

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