Paperless-Office Finally Arriving, Well Almost
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Technology was supposed to create the paperless office, but as we know, IT only made printing easier and cheaper. Use of paper in offices around the globe more than doubled in the last two decades of the 20th century. |
But the use of paper in the U.S. workplace has been declining since 2001.
What changed? Here's the answer from The Economist:
The explanation seems to be sociological rather than technological. A new generation of workers, who have grown up with e-mail, word processing and the Internet, feel less of a need to print documents out than their older colleagues did. Offices are still far from paperless, but the trend is clear.
Sometimes it just takes time for discredited technological prophecies to become true.
The prognostications of the dotcom era were shown to be extravagantly wide of the mark when the bubble burst in 2000-01. But many dotcom business models had been predicated on the wide availability of broadband internet connections, which for regulatory reasons spread more slowly than expected. As broadband grew, many predictions made during the boom--about the value of online advertising and the volume of e-commerce, for example--came true after all, albeit a few years late.
And another one, cited by The Economist: the electric car.
The plunge in the oil price in the late 1990s and the cancellation of the EV1 by General Motors in 2003 seemed to sound the death knell for electric cars. But growing concern about climate change, worries about energy security and a spike in the oil price have since effected an astonishing turnaround.
"Make an electronic note to yourself," the article concludes, "remember the paperless office and never say never."
