The Impact of Computers on the Use of Paper

ByJohn Seely Brown and Paul Duguid - Reprinted from Audio-Tech Magazine

Of all the predictions to come out of the digital revolution, none has been more popular than the end of paper. Futurologists, it seems, can see no value in paper whatsoever, mainly because they view it as nothing more than a receptacle in which information is carried from place to place. It must be frustrating to them, therefore, to note that information technology seems to have accelerated, not slowed, the use of paper.

As we've already noted, paper consumption rose from 87 million to 99 million tons per year in the past decade. This is happening despite vigorous efforts to reduce its use. Aetna alone claims to be using 100 million fewer pages per year. Meanwhile, the overall amount of paper used in offices alone increased by 33 percent.

Although the laser printer is responsible for a great deal of the additional use, paper has stuck around for more than technical reasons. Paper is a rich and complex resource than cannot easily be replaced by bits and bytes.

For the Love of Paper

Take the bulky, seemingly impractical newspaper, whose death has been predicted since the telegraph was introduced. People have been trying to replace it for at least 50 years without success. And even despite the Web, the newspaper seems more robust than ever.

It's worth noting that the flagship publication of the digital age, Wired, is inescapably a hardcopy magazine. And Microsoft's on-line magazine Slate was such a failure that it printed a paper edition in an attempt to keep the publication afloat. Even while newspapers are experimenting with Web-based counterparts, the one thing they can rely upon is their heavy, antiquated paper editions.

Another prediction that has not come true is the dominance of digital libraries. Project Gutenberg, a well-funded attempt to put the Library of Congress on line, has been under way for 30 years and has yielded only 10,000 digitized titles. That doesn't even put a dent in what's already out there, never mind what's being published each year. And if that's not enough evidence, the rise of the fax machine and the popularity of the Post-It note in an age of personal computers attests to the staying power of paper.

Attempts to market personalized newspapers on-line have met with surprising resistance, owing largely to a misunderstanding about what exactly people get out of reading a newspaper. It's certainly not information. And it's not entirely news, either.

People read as much between the lines as they do the text itself. Newspapers carefully select stories and weave them together, and even place them in ways that carry significance. An article on the front page is considered more important than the same story would be on page 23. Captions, photographs, and subheads all contribute to meaning and context. An on-line newspaper that tries to convey the news in plain text, without the paper and all of the design elements, faces significant challenges.

Most importantly, traditional newspapers are the shared documents that bind people together into communities. Since the early 19th Century, newspapers have played a central role in developing the consciousness of the United States, as they were picked up, clipped, marked up, and passed around with abandon. And so the personalized newspaper is almost a contradiction in terms, stripping the paper of its evident function as a ritual object that is central to our textual communities and our sense of identity.

The take-home lessons concern information technology directly. To aim our new technology at producing more and more information is not the path toward valuable social documents. The authors don't call for the abolition of the new information technologies, but they do point out that their design must find a way to embrace and complement paper and ink, not try to replace it. Like it or not, paper is here to stay.

Paper and Society

Much of the hyperbole surrounding the digital revolution arises out of an impulse to use its powers to solve problems, to free society of what are seen as constraints. Many of the authors' criticisms are aimed at the fact that the benefits and drawbacks of social resources often overlap. Information loses a great deal of its utility when its social context is ignored or misunderstood. New technologies that aim to remove surface constraints often miss the underlying usefulness they contain. That results in cases of stubborn resistance, such as those seen in paper, pencils, and hinges.

In addition, those cases may point out more serious problems of misguided design. In particular, the tunnel vision of info-centrism ignores the workings of the real world. What looks like extraneous clutter to the eyes of a technology designer may be a valuable and irreplaceable resource.

And so the authors advise, before an apparent constraint, such as paper, is dismissed, it is important to consider the social resources people have developed around it. The most robust clue that this is the case is simply that people will not readily relinquish the old in favor of the new. Conversely, designers must actively seek out ways to turn constraints into resources. Simply ignoring those resources can result in new technologies either failing or biting back in unexpected ways.

Institutions are subject to the same rules. Although they are viewed as constraining, they more often contain hidden resources that people want and need. It is especially important to examine older institutions as they are being replaced by new ones, when they are easiest to dismiss, for they shape human actions and technologies in significant ways, whether designers intend them to or not.

A powerful example can be seen in the emerging trend toward online colleges and the predictions of the end of the university. Although there are no true online colleges yet, there are plenty of advertisements for them. But the authors argue that the university won't die, though it will surely be restructured by information technology. A report from Coopers & Lybrand argues that 25 packaged courses can take care of half of community college and one-third of four-year college enrollments. In the newly competitive environment, the race is on to provide those courses.

The essence of the college experience, and the value of the degree to employers however, involves a great deal more than simply transferring information. It involves the deep cultural experience of the campus. Predictions such as a university without a campus ignore the fact that students often learn their most important lessons from each other, not from their teachers. Again, this brings us back to the core premise of Brown and Duguid's book: information technology is useless without the social context that gives meaning and value to information.

In the end, they urge us all to look not so much at the road ahead but at the landscape around us, and to see the context that will so deeply influence the design of the next generations of information technologies.

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