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

to deliver information, as long as the information reaches its intended recipient.
Of course, the main purpose of a container is storage. A Tupperware container
stores last night’s leftovers, and a newspaper stores news for the journey it
must make between the printing plant and the reader’s doorstep. But the
argument that hard-copy newspapers are just containers implies that of the two
roles paper performs, only one has value: the storage role. Since that happens
to be the role paper is losing over time, it’s no wonder that, by the lights of the
container school, paper appears doomed.
Though paper’s work has been shifting away from storage and toward
communication, for some reason we seldom think or talk about what exactly
happens when paper communicates. This is because media communication
appears to be a form of transportation: Like UPS trucks, information
technologies simply move product from one place to another. However, there
is one important way in which they are not like trucks at all. After information
arrives at its destination, something else has to happen for the communication
to be complete: The individual must interact with the medium, using his or her
senses and cognitive abilities to understand the content. In the case of paper,
this is the moment when we pick up a sheet, or dozens of sheets joined
together to form a newspaper, magazine or book, and begin reading. If we
could get to the bottom of that moment – which we take for granted, though
it’s a profound, almost magical event – we might be able to say why paper has
endured this far into the age of electronic media, and whether it will continue
to figure in our lives.
Which points to the other reason why, in trying to make sense of our
own media landscape, it’s helpful to keep Hamlet and his erasable tables in
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