The Paperless Office

I've worked for the same college for over six years, and had the same computer since I first arrived.  I don't do the same kinds of high-powered graphics and animations that some of my colleagues (and almost all of my students) create for their daily work, so my 2005 Dell workstation keeps up with me just fine.  (I got a new keyboard yesterday, which is like getting new tires for the car — everything feels just a little bit sharper.)  At home, I'm using a 2009 MacBook, a dinky little laptop.  Both are more than adequate, though I must say that I've gotten VERY comfortable with the addition of an oversized monitor both at home and at work.  It's a real luxury to have two windows open on two different monitors, since I'm always working on data reports in Word from data stored in Excel or Access.  No more toggling back and forth between documents.

I back up both machines about once a month or so, onto a little shirt-pocket-sized hard drive that cost less than $70 but holds six thousand times as much data as my first computer.  Most of my working archives would be well protected in case of disasters like computer theft or network failure.

But still, although almost all of my work takes its native form in either spoken language or in electronic pulsations, the output is often mediated through sheets of paper.  Many, many sheets of paper.  And the inputs!  Every day, I get catalogs for publishers, brochures for conferences, flyers for assessment services or software, invitations to join some group of college administrators or another.  Every week, I get 49 pieces of student homework, agendas for a dozen meetings, handouts of other people's progress, policy proposals.  I get letters from accreditation agencies, forms to complete, bills.

At home it's no better.  I get The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, bills from National Grid gas and National Grid electric and Verizon Wireless and Comcast and Commerce Insurance and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, statements from Sovereign Bank and the Duke University Credit Union and TIAA/CREF and Social Security.  Plus weekly ad flyers, pizza and Chinese restaurant menus, and injunctions to vote for or against some candidate.

I was looking for some paperwork this morning at home, before heading in for a long day (thesis review tonight from 7-9 pm).  And although I moved and filed (or recycled) 487,219 pieces of paper, I couldn't find the ones I wanted.  Maybe they're at home in Vermont, which produces its own daily paper harvest.

In 1975, Business Week predicted that through the use of leading-edge technology such as magnetic tape Selectric typewriters, display text editors, facsimile machines and electronic mail, the use of paper in offices would decline drastically — in fact, IBM copywriters created the phrase "the paperless office" way back in 1964 to indicate the opportunities that could be had by letting IBM sell you every piece of business technology they could muster.  Instead, the use of paper has more than doubled in the US since then. 

And I have most of it.

One of my favorite parts of the Business Week article is the discussion of how technology will disrupt the secretary-executive relationship.  We don't remember how much secretarial work was like dating back in the day, but girls started out in the steno or ten-key pools (extra points to anybody who remembers what a ten-key was), and only through talent and dedication (and personal grooming and charm) rose to be an assistant to some junior exec.  Business Week was clear about the social changes of seemingly neutral technology:  "...word processing is a tough sell, particularly since it so often changes the traditional secretary-executive relationship. 'The biggest problem we face is the office wife,' says Lexitron's Pugh. 'She likes giving total loyalty to one boss, and he likes getting it.' "  Yes, I'm sure he does. 

SHE could find my Vermont Health Care Proxy, I'll bet...

And don't even get me started on books.  Between Nora and I and what we've brought back from New York, we're probably in the ballpark of 5,000 or so.  Most of which we've actually read, which means that the big ideas have been converted into neural impulses.  They're backed up, as it were, and could perhaps be discarded.  But they act, individually and collectively, as totems.  They mark us as members of the tribe of serious readers, and the symbolic value matters greatly.  Just as the logic of word processing was resisted by the emotional life of the office, the logic of paperlessness is resisted by the reassurances offered through paper.