Information Technology Meets Global Ecology VII: Is the Paperless Office a
Generational Thing?
Though we take advantage of digital technology for info -- searchs, email,
chats, and games, we don't quite trust it. We’ve all been burned by our
computers at one time or another. In the back of our minds is the haunting
doubt, “What if my computer crashes and I lose all my files?” For most of us,
a paper-copy backup still feels safer than something on hard-disk. My mother
routinely prints out every email to read it and save it in the ‘real world.’
The major obstacle to reaching the paperless office may be "sociotechnical,"
according to a report funded by the Electronic Document Systems Foundation.
People like the smell of opening a book. We may simply prefer paper.
But there are those who think the paperless office is occurring in a slow
transition. The EPA hosts information for corporate members in a group called
WasteWise.1 They report many instances of dramatic savings in office waste
in the following general categories:
- on-line purchasing catalogs, directories, human resource documents, and
corporate policy manuals avoid the need for constantly updated paper versions
- CD/ROMs or other electronic filing and storage systems store vast
quantities of well-indexed information without the use of paper
- Electronic data interchange (EDI) saves $1 to $5 per document over paper --
(other e-commerce business-to-business savings have yet to be measured)
Maybe our attachment to paper is a generational phenomenon. At an e-commerce
business conference at UC Berkeley last year, I sat at a table of mostly
20-somethings and one of our topics was how we handle email. To a man (I was
the only woman), they all said they read email once, on the screen, and dump
it.
Microsoft and the Clinton administration should have been so wise!
* *
Stay tuned next week for a continuation of our discussion about computers and
resources: do you leave your PC on 24X7?
1 United States Environmental Protection Agency, Solid Waste and Emergency
Response (5306W). The article cited is June 1996. For more info on WasteWise:
800 EPA-WISE, or see www.epa.gov/wastewise.
