A Greener Office
October 10, 2008 by Barbara
Filed under Barbara Schwartz
The Economist’s Daily Chart today is about the so-called “paperless” office: Remember back in the day when the Internet and computers were going to free us from the copy machine and staples? Instead of going through reams of paper to distribute reports, we’d just read them on the PDFs on our monitors.
Not so, according to The Economist:
What actually happened was that global consumption of office paper more than doubled in the last two decades of the 20th century, as digital technology made printing cheaper and easier.
However, the magazine does see signs that younger workers who’ve grown up with office technology are printing less today.
Check out the story at www.economist.com
Barbara Schwartz is the editorial director at the Xenia Institute. She lives in Oklahoma City, Okla., and currently is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.
Having done extensive experiments with this personally, and researching this a bit, it seems the primary issue is no one wants to read that much text on a computer screen.
That probably has a great deal to do with why short blog posts are so popular, too!
Personally, I think the future may lie in eInk (like Amazon’s Kindle). It’s portable and not at all problematic to read large chunks of text on. The tech is still in its infancy, however. Still, I think it may be eventual answer to the “paperless office” to some degree – small, paper notebook sized devices that are light, go a very long time without charging, are easy to read and not terribly expensive may finally give us a reasonable option.