The Return of the "Paperless Office"?

Just as the paperless office was supposedly imminent in the 1980s, a paperless world seems to be just around the corner. Or is it?

Run for your lives! The paperless office is back!

Like the relentless killer in the final minutes of a slasher flick, the paperless office – a Utopian concept that never quite became a reality, despite mountains of hype – refuses to be killed. Only this time, it’s more powerful than ever. It’s not just a paperless office the self-appointed futurists are hawking, it’s an entirely paperless world. No more pesky books!

The hope of a paperless lifestyle is not new to those of us who lived through the 1980s. That’s when the first wave of personal computers found its way into the workplace. Although those early PCs were primitive by today’s standards, somehow their potential was inflated.

They were going to change our lives. They were going to transform they way we worked, making us more productive in the process. Best and most revolutionary of all, workers would never have to deal with all those nasty slips of paper ever again. In the future, nothing would be written down. There would be no need for photocopies. There would be no more thick phone directories. Every task would be performed on the screen in front of you, every scrap of information stored on floppy disk.

Flash-forward to 2010 ... Computers have changed our lives, to a degree. Yet all the evidence suggests paper isn’t going away any time soon. Although typewriters have been rendered obsolete, every office still has a photocopier or two. If you go into any business-supply store, you’ll find an entire wall of implements – pens, pencils, markers – for writing on paper.

How entrenched is paper in our lives? Since the concept of the paperless office was first floated, an entire industry based on the recycling of paper products has sprung up. At some banks, customers still have to sign a little white slip while depositing cheques. And as far as journalism goes, there are still plenty of workers in every city and town who go from door to door, delivering each day’s print edition – the only difference being that child labourers have been replaced by adults.

If you want a measure of how enduring paper is in the internet era, read humourist Mike Daisey’s memoir of working at Amazon, 21 Dog Years. In the hilarious book, Daisey describes how early Amazon employees relied on transactions that were phoned in by customers, then jotted down on scraps of paper. Yes, it’s true: it was primitive paper, the most basic of communications devices, that kept one of the web’s hottest properties viable.

Decades later, we haven’t eliminated the paper from our offices, or our lives. The truth is that paper now co-exists alongside computers. The internet didn’t kill daily newspapers, it just gave readers an alternative way to consume information.

But none of these facts are preventing proponents of the iPad and e-readers like the Kindle from resurrecting the revolutionary underpinnings of the paperless office concept, and even expanding on them. Columnist David Canton recently sounded the death knell of paper once more:

In my view, the advent of tablet computers will be looked upon in the future as a game-changing event. Tablets will forever change how we consume information and media. Paper-based newspapers, magazines, and books are already being supplanted by electronic versions. The portability and ease of use of tablets will accelerate this trend.

Note the wording: Canton thinks the new breed of touchable computer is going to supplant, not merely complement, dead-tree media.

Just as the paperless office was imminent in the 1980s, the paperless world – free of books, free of newspaper print editions – is just around the corner. You might have thought we would have made our peace with paper by now, but no. We never learn.

A line from "The Sad Café," an old Eagles tune, comes to mind:

“Things in this life change very slowly/If they ever change at all.”

This article was originally published in the London Free Press.