For office innovators, the unrealized dream of the paperless’
office is a classic example of high-tech hubris. Today’s office drone is
drowning in more paper than ever before. But after decades of
hype, American offices may finally be losing their paper obsession. The demand
for paper used to outstrip the growth of the US economy, but the past two or
three years have seen a marked slowdown in sales--despite a healthy economic
scene. Analysts attribute the decline to advances in digital
databases and communication systems, employment trends, and a generation of
office workers who are more comfortable with the new technology. Escaping our
craving for paper, however, will be anything but a cold-turkey affair.
66. ______. In the early to mid-90s, a booming economy and
improved desktop printers helped boost paper sales by 6 to 7 percent each year.
The convenience of desktop printing allows office workers to indulge in printing
anything and everything at very little effort or cost. 67.
______. In addition, Mr. Maine points to the lackluster
employment market for white-collar workers--the primary driver of office paper
consumption--for the shift in paper usage. The real paradigm
shift may be in the way paper is used. Since the advent of advanced and reliable
office-network systems, data storage has moved away from paper archives. The
secretarial art of "filing" is disappearing from job descriptions. Much of
today’s data may never leave its original digital format. To
reduce paper use, some companies are working to combine digital and paper
capabilities. For example, Xerox Corp. is developing electronic paper: thin
digital displays that respond to a stylus, like a pen on paper. Notations can be
easily erased or saved digitally. Another idea, intelligent
paper, comes from Anoto Group. It would allow notations made with a stylus on a
page printed with a special magnetic ink to simultaneously appear on a computer
screen. 68. ______. In the same way that digital
innovations have increased paper consumption, Saffo says, so has video
conferencing--with its promise of fewer in-person meetings--boosted business
travel. "That’s one of the great ironies of the information
age", Saffo says. "It’s just common sense that the more you talk to someone by
phone or computer, it inevitably leads to a face-to-face meeting. The best thing
for the aviation industry was the Internet." As buzzwords go,
"paperless" has been bandied about for a long time with little or no results.
The term "paperless clearing houses" was probably first coined in a 1966 article
in the Harvard Business Review in reference to the emergence of digital data
storage. 69. ______. The article quoted Xerox’s
George Pake, who rightly predicted a "TV-display terminal with keyboard" on
office desks by 1995. "I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the
screen, or by pressing a button," Pake told Business Week. "I can get my mail or
any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy (printed paper) I’U want in this
world". Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the term "paperless" came to
embody technology’s promise to permanently change the way people do
business. The exuberance sometimes took on a life of its own,
with the trendiest companies demanding "paperlessness" long before it was
practical. 70. ______. "You can never go wrong
by betting that change will go slower than everyone expects", says a sage Saffo.
"We’re still lurching into the paperless office future. That’s a little bit of a
surprise to me, but I didn’t expect paper to disappear completely."
A. But "paperlessness" did not enter the public’s imagination until 1975,
when a Business Week article entitled "The Office of the Future" predicted that
by 1990 "most record-handling will be electronic." B. But now,
the growth rate of paper sales in the United States is flattening by about half
a percent each year. Between 2004 and 2005, Ms. Dunn says, plain white
office-paper will see less than a 4 percent growth rate, despite the strong
overall economy. A primary reason for the change, says Duma, is that for the
first time ever, some 47 percent of the workforce entered the job market after
computers had already been introduced to offices. C. "Old habits
are hard to break", says Merilyn Dunn, communications supplies director for
InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, a market research firm in Weymouth, Mass. "There
are some functions that paper serves where a screen display doesn’t work. Those
functions are both its strength and its weakness." D. Even with
such technological advances, the improved capabilities of digital storage
continues to act against "paperlessness’, argues Paul Saffo, a technology
forecaster at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif. In
his prophetic and metaphorical 1989 essay, he suggests that the increasing
amounts of electronic data necessarily require more paper. E.
"The information industry today is like a huge electronic pinata, composed of a
thin paper crust surrounding an electronic core," Mr. Saffo wrote. The growing
paper crust "is most noticeable, but the hidden electronic core that produces
the crust is far larger--and growing more rapidly. The result is that we are
becoming paperless, but we hardly notice at all." F. In 1993,
advertising mogul Jay Chiat of Chiat/Day was inspired to "free" his employees
from paper--and to make that freedom mandatory--by eliminating desks and filing
cabinets. The awkward, abortive attempt backfired: Employees started storing
paper in the trunks of their cars and hauling it around the office on toy
wagons.