If you’re one of those still trying to clean out your 2005 files to make room for 2006’s blizzard of paper, you well know the meaninglessness of the phrase “paperless office.”
Any cubicle dweller who’s been toiling in the American economy for more than a decade remembers the heady days of the late 20th century when the computer revolution had futurists and computer salesmen waxing poetic about workplaces without paper.
Time has proven them wrong, to say the least. In offices across the world, fax machines and printers churn tirelessly, covering reams of paper as fast as the office-supply delivery guy can bring them to the office.
We’ve all got colleagues who work hard to print everything that flashes across their computer monitors and then stack all that paper somewhere in their cubes.
But, despite all the evidence surrounding us in our offices, the paper tide may actually be easing, according to a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor.
In the 1990s, paper sales grew by 6 to 7 percent a year as office workers put all those new printers to heavy use.
But now, office paper sales are growing at less than 4 percent a year.
Generational change may be at work here.
Merilyn Dunn, an employee with a Massachusetts market-research firm, told the Monitor that nearly half of the office workforce is made up of younger people who went to work after computers became widespread.Apparently they are less inclined to tap Control-P on their keyboards.
Another consultant, John Maine, told the newspaper, “We’re finally seeing a reduction in the amount of paper being used per worker. More information is being transmitted electronically, and more and more people are comfortable with the information residing only in electronic form.”
That’s a positive trend, but few of us expect any office to ever become truly paperless.
The Monitor story referenced a 1989 essay by California technology forecaster Paul Saffo, who made this prediction:
“The information industry is like a huge electronic piñata, composed of a thin paper crust surrounding an electronic core.” The 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 it at all.”
