 For the second time in
a month, we have a new innovation designed to replace paper. Two weeks
ago I wrote about Toshiba's new erasable
paper. And yesterday, the Washington Post described the steps
several organizations, led by Xerox spinoff Gyricon, are taking to
develop electric
paper, a flexible, ultrathin, rollable, plastic, electronic display
medium which can be repeatedly imprinted using a pocket-sized
cylindrical device.
Last July I covered a Malcolm Gladwell article on The Social
Life of Paper. In that article, Gladwell laid out three
"affordances" of paper that electronic equivalents will have to match
if they hope to replace it:
- spacial flexibility: easy to move around, sort, organize
and prioritize in a tangible, physical, humanly ideosyncratic way, even
before the author/user has decided if/how to categorize it (so it can
be filed)
- tailorability: easy to annotate in multiple, personal ways,
without inexorably defacing the original, thus suiting itself to
collaborative effort
- browsability: easy to skip ahead, and back and forth to
study two or more sections or passages in parallel
He could have added:
- affordability
- legibility, under different light conditions
- ease of use, and re-use
Gladwell believes that messy desks and offices are simply exploiting
paper's ability to facilitate personal, flexible organizing of
information, each document "a contextual clue to an unresolved idea"
and that filing cabinets (which have a lot in common with PC content
management systems) offer no such flexibility and are merely "final
resting places for documents that are unlikely thereafter ever to see
the light of day again". I think most of us would agree that 'finding
stuff' in cabinets and hard drives is a frustrating, inefficient,
unintuitive, and often futile process. We might even agree with
Gladwell that the stuff we keep on paper is not knowledge itself but
rather 'support for the knowledge that resides in people's heads'.
Neither of the new inventions -- erasable paper and electric paper --
meet the six critical criteria bulleted above -- yet.
The challenge to replacing paper is as awesome as the benefits that
would come from doing it -- a huge reduction in trees cut down, waste
in landfills, and polluting chemicals and processes. My guess is that
no one magic product will do it, and the problem will need to be
parsed: There are four main uses of paper, which, in decreasing order
of landfill volume are:
- newspapers, magazines and other mass media products
- disposable papers for cleaning and hygiene
- documents
- packaging
Rather than a futile attempt to replace paper documents, the most
complex, varied and difficult of the four applications, I think the
technology innovators should be focusing on the other three.
What would it take before you would replace paper, in each of these
four applications, with a high-tech equivalent? Can you see it
happening in your lifetime?
And since my new business Meeting of
Minds is developing a paper on Personal Content Management, I
could also use your advice on how all your personal information -- the
'stuff' on your desk, in your rolodex and filing cabinets and datebook
and blog and accordian files and 'My Documents' folder, and on your
refrigerator door -- might be seamlessly and intuitively aggregated and
integrated into a versatile schema of 'My Information'. Not a taxonomy,
mind you. A schema -- an organizing mechanism.
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