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By Robert J. Samuelson
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OUR OFFICE--NEWSWEEK'S WASHINGTON BUREAU--is approaching a milestone of sorts. The office copier is nearing its millionth copy. As I start this column, it has spit out 975,312 copies in three years. This comes to almost 900 a day, including weekends and holidays. It also comes to about 10,800 copies a year for each of the roughly 30 people who work in the bureau. We are endlessly copying story drafts, expense accounts, letters to friends and enemies, newspaper articles, newsletters, book manuscripts and government documents (secret and otherwise). We couldn't live without paper, and we don't.
Neither does anyone else. The oft-predicted paperless society hasn't happened--and never will. Just the opposite: the more high-tech we become, the more low-tech paper we use. In 1996 the average American used 382 pounds of paper, up almost 40 percent since 1966. Deconstructing this increase illuminates ordinary habits. Newsprint per person is down 6 percent: readership is dropping. Tissue use is up 51 percent: Americans are keeping their noses and fannies cleaner than ever. But the biggest increase (in percentage and pounds) occurred in printing and writing paper, mainly office paper. In 1996 the average American used 213 pounds of it, double the amount in 1966.
What we have is an unheralded paper boom that has infiltrated even the highest reaches of high-tech society. The most recent issue of Vanity Fair carries a long profile of Esther Dyson--editor of the newsletter Release 1.0 and a reputed cyber prophet. The article shows a picture of her office, which is a sea tide of papers, lapping over the floor, desk and tables. ""Although forewarned, I was not prepared for her office,'' confesses writer Leslie Bennetts. ""Immense piles of paper are heaped on every available surface . . . '' (The description of Dyson's office, incidentally, intends no disrespect; my office is also a glorious mound of paper.)
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Usually, though, the paper boom goes unnoticed. Because everyone is an addict, the addiction is invisible. Its existence refutes much authoritative prediction. In the 1960s, for example, the paper check was declared doomed. ""Gone forever will be the boring task of writing and mailing checks to pay monthly bills,'' said a 1967 cover story in Forbes. One Harvard economist said the triumph of electronic money was inevitable because ""the terrific load of paper'' was clogging the banking system. What happened? In 1966 Americans wrote about 20 billion checks; in 1996 they wrote roughly 64 billion.
Paper's obituaries proved wrong for two reasons. The first is technology and economics. Over the years, paper has become cheaper, easier to use and more versatile. Therefore, people use more of it. The check survived because it adapted. Even in the 1960s, many checks were cleared by hand; clerks sorted them into pigeonholes by regions and banks. What prevented terminal choking was the machine-readable check, with magnetic coding. Processing machines now sort 50,000 to 80,000 checks an hour.
Or consider the copier. The first modern copier, the Xerox 914, was introduced in 1959 and could make 7.5 copies a minute. Now small personal copiers can make up to 12 copies a minute; monster machines turn out 90 or more. Copiers are everywhere--in schools, libraries, home offices. There are now an estimated 8.1 million of them, says the market-research firm Dataquest. That's more than double the number in 1986, 3.6 million. If you don't have one, you can go to Kinko's or one of its many rivals.
Even more stunning is the fax machine. A decade ago it was a costly novelty. Now we have 16 million fax machines, up from 3.8 million in 1990, says Dataquest. We use them lavishly, even recklessly. Because faxes are cheaper than letters, our bureau gets thousands of them a week. The Center for a New American Dream in Vermont wants us to be less materialistic in our holiday spending and sends me a four-page fax with the results of a new survey: two fifths of Americans have a hard time recalling ""what their spouse or partner bought them last year for Christmas.'' Interesting. Altogether, Americans will send 65 billion pages of faxes in 1997, estimates Dataquest. That's almost 250 per person.
So new technology has saved the old. But old technology also saves the new. Here is the second reason that paper survives--it imposes a crude order on the information glut. Paper helps distinguish between information that's important, relevant and durable and information that isn't. Of course, we're overwhelmed with useless paper, and copiers and faxes have made matters worse. But compared with the cyberworld--where information is almost infinite--paper is a discriminating medium. Dyson's newsletter, for example, is printed and not published online. ""The Internet is not yet a place where people spend their time on a hard read,'' Daphne Kis, the publisher, told Vanity Fair.
In theory, a paperless society seems plausible. Much of what once happened on paper has already shifted to the screen. ""An auto-parts store used to have a huge book where you'd look up all the details about a part; now it's all on computer,'' says John Maine of RISI, a consulting company. E-mail has eliminated many office memos. Electronic money transfer is making inroads into check writing. But, says Maine, for every page of paper that high tech eliminates, it seems to create two. More reports are duplicated; faxes are copied; information is downloaded and printed. As personal computers become appliances--41 percent of households have one--much of this is moving into the home.
A paperless society would be chaotic, moronic or both. What we decide to print or copy aims to make the chaos manageable. It's sometimes an act of self-promotion--an attempt to impress on others what we think is important--and sometimes an act of desperation: a way of regulating the torrents of information. The fact that so much of this soon becomes wastepaper, increasingly recycled into tissue to attend to our bodily needs, does not lessen the underlying impulse. So our office copier will hum along indefinitely. As I finish this column, it's at 980,443.
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