By SCOTT DEWING
Published: October 2005

THE ORANGE LIGHT is blinking again, a pulsing singular eye on this techno-Cyclops calling out for me to feed some more grist into its information mill. “PC Load Letter”—I do what I’m told, pull open the tray and feed this monster a fresh ream of paper. The blinking angry orange eye turns to a solid satisfied green. The printer growls back to life, spitting black toner upon the fresh bone-white sheets. As I stand and wait for my print job to finish, I wonder why I’m still printing anything at all. The Internet, email, electronic document storage and retrieval—these were supposed to usher in the glorious era of the “paperless office”. And yet, years after the miraculous arrival of the Information Superhighway, I’m still standing here before this digital demigod and dutifully casting forth handfuls of sacrificed trees. Where is this fabled “paperless office” and why am I not working in it yet?

There are no fewer than 25 reams of paper on hand in my office. That’s 12,500 sheets of paper. With an office of 17 people, that’s 735 sheets of paper per person. That’s 2 sheets per person per day for the entire year. We’ll chew through that stockpile in several months and I’ll likely be the worst offender. Why? Not because I like killing trees and having paper stacked all over my desk and on the floor. Not because I enjoy hauling confidential printouts to the shredder with its ominous icons of a necktie, a necklace and a hand with a slash across them reminding me of what isn’t supposed to go into the shredder’s grinding metal teeth. None of that. The primary reason I print is because reading documents on my computer sucks.

I tried to “be digital” for a while, vowing not to print out anything that I couldn’t just read on my computer. This was a noble effort that, while perhaps not winning me any recognition or praise from Greenpeace, would save some paper and consequently some trees. In fact, not just some trees—a lot of trees. Producing one ton of paper requires three times its weight in trees. It takes approximately 17 pulpwood trees to make a ton of paper. One of those trees will generate approximately 11,500 sheets of paper, which is equal to 23 reams.

My inner tree hugger was quickly silenced, however, while reading long documents (10 or more pages) on my computer. While attempting to read documents of that length, the glow of the monitor would begin to burn a hole into my retinas through which the first dull throbs of a headache would begin their assault on my temporal lobes. What I discovered is that while today’s computer is fine for reading email, scanning the news on the Web, hunting for deals on eBay or checking your bank account balance online, it is sorely inadequate for any prolonged and in-depth reading. For that, I return to paper. I return to the printer. I return to books. I sacrifice trees.

“We need to substitute for the book a device that will make it easy to transmit information without transporting material, and that will not only present information to people but also process it for them, following procedures they specify, apply, monitor, and, if necessary, revise and reapply.” That was from Libraries of the Future by Joseph Licklider, published in 1965. Yes indeed, but 40 years later, we’re still somewhere between “close” and “no cigar”. We can easily transmit information (“without transporting material”) via the Internet. We can present it on a computer screen. We can process and revise it. But when all is said and done, we’ll probably print that information too.

In The Myth of the Paperless Office (2002), authors Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper contend that Licklider and others were, “foreseeing the explosion of information to come, recognizing that paper-based systems were simply no longer going to provide adequate solutions to dealing with it. It is important to note that these pictures of the future were spurred on by excitement about the possibilities of new technologies…The abandonment of paper was a side effect rather than the key to what the technology made possible.”

I’m back in front of the printer. The pages are spitting out at high speed. One “side effect” of the information explosion has been the invention of the printer, resulting in cheap, fast and easy distributed printing. Document publishing is no longer a time-consuming and expensive process. With the printer, millions of computer users have become one-click publishers just like me.

As I stand and watch yet another tree get processed through the printer, I shake my head at the terrible irony: the very technological advancements that promised to transform the office into a “paperless office” have had quite the opposite effect. The rise of computers and the Internet has resulted in offices being increasingly buried beneath a mountain of paper. And while I vow again to print less, print double-sided and recycle the paper I use, I realize that our only hope of realizing the paperless office will be the invention and wide-spread adoption of electronic display devices that are portable, flexible and easy on the eyes just like paper.

Only then will we be able to pull the plug on our collective printers and haul them out to an empty field like the posse of embittered software engineers in the movie Office Space, where, with a Louisville Slugger, we’ll celebrate our liberation in a shower of plastic, copper and silicon.