Why Paper Is Eternal - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press ...

going to so much trouble to write a letter on paper, when I could write the very
same words in an email that would take less than 5 minutes to compose and
send, and arrive instantly at Steve’s computer screen in Los Angeles, or, if he
was traveling, on his Blackberry? The clerk was essentially asking me to make
the same choice I’d already made, choose the paper medium over the electronic
one, even though it required a little extra time and effort. And why not? The
store is called Papyrus.
A letter is different from a dollar bill, but as media they perform the
same fundamental task, transferring abstractions (thoughts in one case,
monetary value in the other) from party A to party B. Both are containers. So
why do they feel so different? I enjoy paying with plastic cards and look
forward to the day when I won’t have to carry any cash at all. Yet in other parts
of my life, I still sometimes prefer paper over the electronic alternatives. Most
of the news I read I get online in quick hits during the day. But there are certain
situations (on an airplane), places (the kitchen table, the living room), and times
of the day (first thing in the morning) when I prefer the hard-copy newspaper
to the screen. So I pay hundreds of dollars a year to have two papers, The New
York Times and The Wall Street Journal, delivered to my house.
Though paper has faded from some parts of modern life, in others it
hangs in there, in spite of high technology and in some ways because of it. The
printers and copiers that are fixtures of homes and businesses exist solely to
spray electronic information onto paper. In a recent story about the efforts of
American financial institutions to convince consumers to forego paper, The
Wall Street Journal reported that “some paperless practices have caught on . . . .
[I]n households with Internet connections, consumers are now paying more of
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