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

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storage. In a digital world, paper actually has quite a few limitations: (1) It takes up physical space; (2) It can only be in one place at a time (virtual media can be accessed from anywhere); (3) It is difficult to alter or edit; (4) It does not play moving images or sound; and (5) It cannot network or connect to other media. The mystery is why a medium with so many disadvantages is still all around us. In “The Electronic Piñata,” Paul Saffo argues that the ubiquity of paper is deceptive. Yes, there is more paper than ever before, but that’s because electronic technologies are growing at an even faster rate, while at the same time producing paper. In effect, paper owes its continued popularity to the newer media that are in fact supplanting it. To illustrate how this works, Saffo imagines the information media as a piñata: The relationship between our use of paper and electronics parallels the relationship between the surface area and the volume of a sphere. As a sphere expands, its volume inside increases more rapidly than the surface area. The information industry today is like a huge electronic piñata, composed of a thin paper crust surrounding an electronic core. The paper crust is most noticeable but the hidden electronic core that produces the crust is far larger – and growing more rapidly. The result is that we are becoming paperless, but we hardly notice it at all. For example, The Wall Street Journal is written and edited on computer screens, electronically composed and typeset, and then bounced off satellites to remote printing plants all over the country. The Journal isn’t reduced to paper in any meaningful way until just hours before it appears on our doorsteps. The same pattern can be discerned in our offices. Xerographic copies are a classic piñata technology – by 33
automating the once laborious copying process, they have buried us beneath an avalanche of fiber. It’s the paper we notice, but the underlying process – the copier – shows how the function of paper is changing. 56 But why is the paper crust there at all? If electronic media are the engine at the heart of the information world (and this seems inarguable) why do they still need an interface as old-fashioned as paper? Modern interfaces are superior in so many ways. There are screens everywhere now, and they do things paper cannot do: show video clips and movies, play music, refresh themselves, interact with other screens. Saffo wrote his piñata piece 15 years ago; surely by now it should have burst. Conventional wisdom says paper lingers out of habit. The medium has been with us for more than 2,000 years and we are having trouble letting go. In this view, paper effectively is what child psychologists call a “transitional object,” a security blanket we carry around to help us feel better during the rocky passage to a more advanced, “grown-up” media future. The flaw in this thinking is the assumption that paper is inherently inferior to newer technologies. As the lowly hinged door reminds us, this is not necessarily true. A wiser approach is to make no assumption whatsoever about paper’s worth, relative status or future, and focus instead on how it does its job, right now in the real world. In the last decade or so, a handful of researchers have looked at what happens when people interact with paper, and in some cases compared that dynamic to human interactions with other media. Their findings suggest that paper has intrinsic properties that (1) make it easy and enjoyable to work with, 34
Page 1 and 2: Joan Shore
Page 3 and 4: the familiar form that gave them th
Page 5 and 6: Paper doesn’t se
Page 7 and 8: 1 On the evening of Monday, Februar
Page 9 and 10: less effectively, in a digital form
Page 11 and 12: time machine that travels in only o
Page 13 and 14: depth. As Tom Rosenstiel, director
Page 15 and 16: newspapers, but paper broadly defin
Page 17 and 18: going to so much trouble to write a
Page 19 and 20: The persistence of paper flies in t
Page 21 and 22: It appeared that Business Week’s
Page 23 and 24: Even as paper thrived in the Middle
Page 25 and 26: communication. Rather, the two infl
Page 27 and 28: My tables, My tables - meet it is I
Page 29 and 30: last thirty years, computers and ot
Page 31 and 32: mind. Think about the situation the
Page 33: 3 What is paper? A thin, flexible,
Page 37 and 38: The study found that paper has inhe
Page 39 and 40: do understand what a document conve
Page 41 and 42: Nast is one of the world’s premie
Page 43 and 44: skip the commercials. In other word
Page 45 and 46: They praised the way magazine ads o
Page 47 and 48: The argument Condé Nast is making
Page 49 and 50: Though reading is one of the flow a
Page 51 and 52: link of an eye, a paper document im
Page 53 and 54: 4 If paper works so well for people
Page 55 and 56: But something is also missing. The
Page 57 and 58: itself in the tough spot it’s in.
Page 59 and 60: efore you fly off elsewhere, but en
Page 61 and 62: The other problem is that e-books l
Page 63 and 64: attempted, and even then, it’s im
Page 65 and 66: 13 Mark Patinkin, “I’ll Miss Ha
Page 67 and 68: 56 Saffo, “The Electronic Piñata
Page 69 and 70: Sources Abrahamson, Eric and David
Page 71 and 72: Google.com. 2007. “Introducing Gm
Page 73 and 74: The New York Times. 2007. “Introd
Page 75: Trotter, Emma. 2007. “Panel Discu

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