Monday, December 3, 2001		Article

HUMILITY is the best policy for technological forecasters. If you doubt that, remember those confident predictions of 30 years ago about the imminent arrival of the 'paperless office'. The advent of ubiquitous computing in the workplace would, we were assured, wean us off our centuries-old addiction to squeezing vegetable dyes onto processed wood pulp. Paper would soon be a thing of the past.

And guess what? Paper is big business - still. In fact, sales of the stuff are ballooning. And the biggest beneficiary, it seems, is Canada, the world's largest exporter of office printing paper, which more than doubled its exports in the past 15 years - the years of the information technology 'revolution'.

Bill Gates's vision of a computer on every organisational desk has been more or less realised. Yet most of the folks working at those desks are knee-deep in paper. Hewlett-Packard forecasts that North American office printers alone will spew out 1.2 trillion sheets this year - an increase of more than 50 per cent in five years. Research from an intriguing new book, The Myth of the Paperless Office, by Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen, suggests that our increasing use of paper is due to the introduction of the very digital technology that was supposed to wipe it out. The case studies on e-mail in the workplace, for example, show that it can lead to a 40 per cent increase in paper consumption - and this doesn't take into account the amount of paper used to print information from the web.

There's a delicious irony here, because the personal computer - not to mention the laser printer - was invented in a lab (Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre) set up by a copier company that was worried by all talk of paperless offices. Xerox's core business involved paper and was understandably alarmed by the prospect of it going out of fashion. So the research centre invented the computing and printer technology that made sure it didn't. Perhaps those Xerox executives knew what they were doing, after all.

But I digress. Our attachment to paper is truly staggering. Astonishing proportions of e-mail users, for example, print off their messages and store them all in filing cabinets. Organisations that used to do massive print runs of documents for meetings now circulate them electronically via their Intranets. But those attending said meetings generally turn up with piles of paper hot off the nearest laser printer - a process much more resource-intensive and less efficient than proper offset printing.

To the technological rationalist, this behaviour seems perverse. Why store e-mail messages in paper files, which take up valuable real estate and are effectively unsearchable, when you can keep them on a hard disk and effortlessly ransack them for keywords and phrases? Why print off bulky documents whose only fate is to be shredded after the meeting is over? The answer of course is that it is the rationalists who are perverse. If people love paper, there must be a reason for it. And there is. It is highly portable (you can even read it on the loo), infinitely flexible (when was the last time you were able to scribble on an electronic document?) and embodies very high-resolution display technology, which consumes no battery power. And it doesn't have to be booted up before you can read it. Given that, the mystery is not that people use so much paper, but that they don't use even more of the stuff. The problem with technological predictions is that they are almost always solution-driven.

'Technology is the answer,' is their underlying mindset. 'Now what was the question again?'

It's daft - and I have the hard copy to prove it.

— ONS