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

do understand what a document conveys by physically getting to grips with it.
Given this, the limits of electronic alternatives (at the current time at least) are
all too clear.” 61
Still, this doesn’t fully explain how paper fosters the state of focused
reading that the IMF employee described. Indeed, Sellen and Harper’s book
often suggests that paper is at its best when one is juggling different documents
and functions – say, writing, editing and reading – a mode that seems closer to
multi-tasking than settling down. However, these two notions are not as
contradictory as they seem. Rather, within a multi-tasking context, printed
documents make it easier to focus on each specific task, and to carry that focus
from task to task. In other words, though the computer is in some ways the
ultimate multi-tasking tool – everything is a click away – for productive multi-
tasking, paper has an edge, rooted in its tangibility. Because online documents
have no physical presence, when we’re reading them the eyes and the brain are
constantly at work figuring out where we are in the text, not just on the page
displayed but in the document as a whole and vis-à-vis other open documents,
as well as where we need to go next. The online reader expends a great deal of
mental energy just navigating. <strong>Paper</strong>’s tangibility allows the hands and fingers to
take over much of the navigational burden, freeing up the brain to think.
Sellen and Harper describe how this works:
“[T]he physical feel of the paper meant that little attention
(and especially visual attention) had to be given over to the
task of page turning. Much of the information needed to
navigate was both implicit and tactile. Similarly, physical cues
such as thickness of the document provided important tacit
information about where in the document the reader was. All
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