John Horvath on Tue, 9 Apr 2002 08:54:04 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> the paper trail |
Just a short note to Malcom Gladwell's excellent piece on the Social Life of Paper. The increase in paper use is not only because of its continued usefulness in our everyday lives, but contrary to the hype of computers saving the trees, computer technology also *encourages* the wasteful use of paper. There are two reasons for this. The first is because of the ease with which copies of a document can be printed out, people are more apt to reprint drafts than make corrections directly on them. Many don't take advantage of print preview features, instead seeing how something looks after it has been printed out, making their adjustments or corrections, and then printing out another version. Often, when it's not the entire document but just a couple of pages, they still reprint the whole document anyway. This is especially so for corrected pages which are not in a sequence. Yet it's not just laziness on the part of users. Some of the problem is on the software side of things. A lot of times, even when print preview functions are used, what you see is not always what you get. Thus, while the hype of the "digital era" may sound appealing, in practice it can never become a reality. As the old saying goes, it's not just a question of technology, but how it's used. John # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net