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The Myth of Paperlessness

The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper is an encouraging and refreshing book on the role of paper as a transactional medium for conceptual work. The book is based on careful research and observation and frequent presentation of findings keeps the reading brisk and exciting.

The FotB convergences include validation of the three parent reading modes and their screen based composite and the conclusion that haptic features of paper based reading facilitates comprehension. The only discord is a projection that the archival function of paper will be superseded by digital archiving. The problematic maintenance of digital archives is not factored.

Here are some general FotB comments:

In general there is a bit too much positioning and repositioning of the prospects for digital reading and writing as alternatives to paper based reading and writing. While making a point of the need to design processes of information handing to accord with formats for information handling, the authors frequently slide into studies of conversion and comparison of formats as such. In the FotB view, what electronic communications are “converting” in office functions are not paper based transactions, but searching, sorting and sending transactions that have always been ill suited or unallocated to paper. In general, what’s great about this study is the finding that paper is an optimal state of text for reading and the handling and annotation of paper texts, during reading, enables comprehension.

Because they are representatives of digital technology interests, the authors must argue the attributes or “affordances” of paper in order to encourage design directives for equivalent digital or on-line affordances. An FotB approach would attempt to integrate distinctive affordances of paper and on-line transactions as such and let the digital future dawn or demise naturally.

The authors indicate that we are now in a zone of hybrid developments that bridge between various technologies, working practices and social settings. The issue then is how extensive this hybrid agenda will be and if we have departed from a previous era of more established thresholds between reading and authoring modes.

Here are some specific FotB comments:

chapter 2. “What’s Wrong with Paper?”

p. 31, “Paper must be used locally and cannot (without supporting technology) be remotely accessed.” (Actually this is even more true of digital files.)

chapter 3. “Paper in Knowledge Work”

p. 56, case studies are based on hand written paper diaries logging a worker’s daily transactions with documents...but the authors fail to comment on, or even confirm, this format of information gathering or the elaboration of the day diaries through spoken interviews...this seems a bit weird.

p. 63, “This study argues for the importance of the physicality of paper as the tangible embodiment of ideas and information.” “The main implication of all this is that paper is important because it makes information accessible and tangible and gives it a persistent presence.”

chapter 4. “Reading from Paper”

p. 72, “Since the time of our study we have noticed that when we look at most workplaces, it is easy to see who is engaged in intensive knowledge work: it is the person whose desk is strewn with paper.”

p. 75, “We are already seeing publishing move away from preordained print runs to a situation where books are only printed on demand. It is not much of a conceptual leap to then foresee not only the end of the library as we know it but also the end of the bookshop as we know it.” (Why is the production of more books an indication of their disappearance?)

p. 76, “The Affordances (or attributes) of Paper for Reading” 1. Paper helps us flexibly navigate through documents. 2. Paper facilitates the cross-referencing of more than one document at a time. 3. Paper allows us to annotate documents easily. 4. Paper allows the interweaving of reading and writing. (The missing 5th affordance could be stated as; “Paper’s haptic factors induce comprehension.”)

p. 92, “Here, we saw readers begin to turn pages well before they were finished reading them.” (This observation of anticipatory actions of comprehension has also been observed at FotB!) “So, in summary, we found that navigating through documents is a vital, supporting activity for reading. As such, it needs to help the reading process rather than get in its way. Navigation through paper was quick, automatic, and interwoven with reading. It was as much tactile, two-handed, and multi fingered as it was visual. On the computer, navigation was slow, laborious, and detracted from reading.”

A more subtle FotB convergence here is the ability of paper to sustain the identity of the three reading modes (visual or verbal, writing, print) while intermingling them. In contrast, the screen based reading mode merges the parent modes into a churning composite that defies the reader’s ability to toggle back and forth between modes.

p. 103, “It is the manipulability of paper that is the key...supporting this flexible interweaving of reading and writing.”

chapter 5. “Paper in Support of Working Together”

The case study of the flight controllers at their tracking screens manipulating their paper flight progress strips is fascinating. Here the shift to a fully digital and automated control system seems likely, but this will then only move the the human-to-system interface somewhere else. Even with automatic control and pilotless aircraft we will still need to confront the interface of being flown.

chapter 6. “Designing New Technologies”

Here the authors are trying to use the analytic resource of the uses of paper as a design directive for development of technologies for office transaction and office reading. This method can be reversed to define analytic resources of digital technologies which is exactly what the authors do. But the FotB observation is that the mouse is an analytical resource of on-line navigation characterized by scurrying, darting and reversing.

p. 142, Put these two sentences together; “Put bluntly, when one has put ink to paper, it cannot be changed or rubbed out.” and “The fact that paper affords marking on may support the goal of making comments and drawing diagrams on a text in a free-form, unrestrained manner.”

What needs to pointed to here and throughout this chapter is that paper affords reading mode intermingling, but not a dissolve of distinctive parent reading modes. The design challenge of the digital transmutation of a digital conversion of paper functionalities is the attempt to migrate the uncertain attribute of the on-line reading mode to dissolve the thresholds between various parent reading modes into those modes. (bad sentence) This is a viral scenario.

p. 145, The authors correctly emphasize that screen resolution has little to do with acceptance of screen reading. The screens are actually easy to read, but just hard to comprehend.

p. 151, A great achievement of this book is its innovation of a truly promising agenda for the development of e-books. "What the affordances of paper tech us about the design of digital devices, then, is that navigational techniques need to be developed that place fewer demands on the visual system so that they interfere less with the main tasks of reading and writing. This can be accomplished in several ways: providing richer nonvisual cues, providing more direct forms of input, and supporting more extensive two-handed input."

The text goes on to elaborate these themes with really fascinating suggestions for haptic clues, especially audio cues, tactile controls including sliders, buttons or pressure sensitive areas and the wonderful suggestions for two-handed management and double screen presentation.

p.158, "We know from our own work that readers will place a display at different angles when writing rather than reading. This suggests that to optimize the two-display design, a two-screen e-book should ideally provide detachable screen so that they can be separately manipulated."

p.170, "There are many ways, then, in which paper is an out-dated, unsuitable technology for preservation and leveraging knowledge of the past." FotB departs company with the authors contention that paper is an inadequate archival medium. They may have taken this path by merging "hot" access" with "cold" content. Such melting together of functionalities messes up their logic. Paper cannot be dismissed as an optimal medium for content storage, just because it is stored off-line. On line library catalogs prove this point. Moreover, new technologies for barcoding and meta-tagging physical paper indicate an ever improving accessibility for paper.

"The potential for preserving knowledge is therefore greatly enhanced by DMS". (digital management systems). But the costs and risks of maintenance of "cold" content in digital format is not mentioned. It is also unfair to discount disadvantages of inert, passive paper archiving in comparison with digital archives maintained by active curation and up-dating. Active curation is a cost regardless of archival format.

chapter 7. "The Future of Paper"

I am curious why the book does not discuss the FAX machine. This example of hybrid use of paper and digital transmission is interesting. Just one interesting feature is that it imparts digital delivery to paper and leaves the sender with the original. They do discuss "over-the-desk" scanning, particularly when that approach is augmented with "pointing hands", or actual audio and manual cues as to a documents meaning.

p. 194, "Rather, in the short term, new technologies will usually shift the role of paper rather than replace it." Actually, the human-to-systems interface is continually shifting position.The authors go on to mention that paper may assume new uses. Such a shift is only fair; the digital revolution is likey to provoke equivalent revolution in the use of paper.

p. 195, "WE have argued that treating the current use of paper as a design resource is in fact a radical approach, one that can lead to innovative new designs and even conceptual leaps over what already exists."

p. 196, "...we have found out time and again that the end result (of using paradigms of paper) has been design that is more original and less like convention digital technology..."

FotB conclusion

This book offers the first e-book scenario that makes sense. The scenario is both built from the exemplar functionalities of paper and at the same time departs to the domain of functionalities of digital communication. This book also contends that the particular attributes of digital communications cannot be transferred to a column of disadvantages of paper. For example, the fact that paper is not mutable is an attribute of paper, not a disadvantage imposed by attributes of digital transmission.

Turns out that, at the present, paper is a technology of transmission more refined than digital transmission. It is also apparent that, in the zones of its particular functionalities, paper may well beat digital transmission to innovations that could extinguish the future role of digital transmission in strategic applications to reading and writing.