LscTecForum

So.  We come to another strange excursion into the land o’ blog.
How many tons of paper does it take to run a college for a year? A city? A nation? A planet?
How much of what we print is just created to be tossed in the shredder?
I commented in an earlier blog that technology permits one person to create more errors in ten seconds than an individual without technology could create in a life time.  I doubt that anyone would disagree with this observation.
One other aspect of technology (frightening) is the destructive capabilities an individual has.  In technologically based warfare, we see pictures of cross-hairs, a bomb delivered, a fireball and a puff of smoke.  We cannot capture the sheer terror such an event causes for the recipients of what the airforce calls a “calling card”.  I will never forget what a marine told me about his tour in ‘Nam.
“I was an 18 year-old kid.  My job was to call in coordinates to a ship to bombard.  One minute there was a tropical jungle, the next it was the surface of the moon.”  Anything in the killing zone was obliterated within minutes.  If my friend gave the incorrect coordinates, he, too, would be in danger of turning into so much vapor.

One legacy of technology is the vast appetite for waste it creates.  The mantra of “more-better-faster, more-better-faster, more-better-…..” repeated over and over again, invokes a techno-Shiva, creating a deluge of destructive demand.  It leaves in its wake a flood-plain filled with the debris born of a Katrina force consumer-cane.  We think nothing of having 2 -3 -4 cars (one for each person), with literrally hundreds of grocery stores, thousands of fast-food restraunts, 100’s of cable channels, a hundred kinds of flakes for breakfast…which brings me to what this type of thinking does to the work place of today.

Before you click “print”, or create a handout and 50 copies to pass to the class, or hold a meeting and create 10 copies of the handout, before you get rid of that old monitor or that old computer, do you stop to think of what needs to be done with it when you are finished?  Have you ever wondered if it was really necessary? Did you think you were being more productive by producing more reports?

I know, you say it can be re-cycled, etc. 
In one posting, I mentioned that the problem with foreign oil is not that it is foreign.  The problem is hidden in the assumption that we need oil.  The same assumptions apply here within an entirely different paradigm.

Do you need to take a perfectly fine electronic representation of a document and turn it into some carbon melted onto a mixture of wood pulp, rag, and binder (printer toner on paper)?  Why is it that we continue to mow down forests so that we can read something?

With computers, it was thought that one day we would have a paper-less office.  Instead, the opposite has occurred.  We have enough printers, copiers, and plotters to create an avalanche of paper output.  Each output device requires maintenance, electricity, consumable, and reams of paper are fed through them all every year.  Instead of questioning the need for this vast waste, we just purchase more printers so that is easier to create additional waste. (sort of like adding lanes to a freeway; they added lanes to 494 in the cities and the volume of traffic saturated the additional lanes, rendering them obsolete before the project was completed.)

The basic assumption we are making is that output needs to be on paper.  I would like to posit that this is foolish, wasteful, and destructive.

We have a document imaging system at LSC that at least decreases some of the storage requirements for all of those documents that are used to create a paper trail for a students academic records.  As a result, precious square footage (just ask someone how much it costs per square foot to build our new building some time) is not taken up with the storage of tons of paper that someone “might” never look at again, but we are legally required to have on hand for the equivalent of eternity.
What hasn’t been created is a method of removing the source  documents from the paper “food” chain. What also hasn’t happened is a more universal adoption of at least this piece of the paperless puzzle.

What if you could have a student sit down with a stylus based input system (handwriting recognition), fill out a form, print the form (not to a printer) to an image which would then be converted to a digital record of the student’s application?
What if we were to invest more money on large flat-screen monitors, stylus based computing that would permit us to mark up these same documents in digital format and then store the marked up document as a permanent digital record, that could be recalled via query at a later point in time.  What if we were to create a digital format for every document that is ever created, and made it our policy that no documents or forms could ever be created for use with paper until it had been proven conclusively that there was no way to produce, store, retrieve, alter, and view the content digitally. 

I believe that at least one of the primary reasons we print so much stuff is because it is hard to read on a computer screen, and it is even harder to manipulate.  We are forced to the bed of Procrustes when it comes to viewing documents or manipulating data; we don’t naturally sit at a keyboard, or press key combinations to select text, or use a mouse to select text.  Even in the most ergonomically designed office, we do not easily sit and read an electronic book.  The screens make us squint, you can’t “cuddle” up with a computer and read it in bed. (this is not a “naughty” bit, but you are welcome to laugh at my mixed metaphors.)
I would suggest that one of the things that needs to happen before we can discontinue our love affair with printers is the “humanization” of computing.  I don’t know if you have seen the “borg” from television’s star trek, but at times I think that computer manufacturers have been getting most of their engineering done by Borgs-’R-US.  Why is it that they can’t make a laptop out of spongy, soft material that you could actually put on your lap comfortably?  Why is it that we have to use uncomfortable and strange input devices (for instance, what if you could have the equivalent of your current computer screen sit inside of a head’s up display in a light-weight pair of glasses?  The glasses would capture the movement of your eyes by scanning for the movement of your iris.  This would in turn permit the user to simply move her eyes with-in this “virtual” field of vision and the document would scroll or sit still based on what your eyes were “looking” at. Within this “virtual screen” you could focus for a moment on a sentence and the software would highlight it when you tapped your fingers on the desk.  You could even wear a ring that would un-obtrusively signal what you wished to copy and paste. This is a very long parenthetical statement…)  like a mouse and keyboard.

Obviously such hardware, if it does exist (some of it does!), is not available for us to use.  But I would suggest that instead of people purchasing a new computer,  another printer, or some more bloated software, we should seriously consider making their work environment more productive by getting them a larger screen (or two), a comfortable chair, a wireless keyboard and some privacy to work in. 
Your mind works better when your body is relaxed and you are un-distracted.  If you could be comfortable and see the screen(s) better, you may be less inclined to print whatever it is you are trying to read and taking it over to a comfortable chair to have a look at it.

What if we made the culture of the college one where we no longer used paper brochures, paper fliers, paper minutes, paper handouts…

What if you never had to fill out a paper time sheet, a paper expense form, a paper whatever it was.  What if it were a digital entity that was created in electronic format with places that someone could digitally “sign” and then save?  The culture of beauracracy thrives on paper forms that you must, must , must fill out so very, very, very carefully because if you don’t, don’t, don’t, you will be slapped on the knuckles with the brass edge of the ruler, ruler, ruler (it is not always quite so awful, but this is what it feels like to me.)  Instead of chiseling out our works on obelisks made of papyrus, it would be much more fruitful and productive; to be able to write, as it were, on a heart of “digital” flesh that is much more amenable to alteration, that is much more forgiving of our scrawls and scratches, and is more easily transported to the tombs of the digital afterlife, where it can be recalled after a millenium, preserved in death as it was in life.

In that awakening, some future oracles will laugh in wonder at our pre-occupation with paper.