Paper Tigers Malcom Gladwell's piece in the New Yorker on the role of paper in the workplace, is utterly fucking wrong. His thesis is that paper enables workplace practices and collaboration that are impossible in electronic systems, and that therefore practices like group collaboration via physical document notation and air traffic controllers using slips of paper to track flight information are better than electronic alternatives. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Gladwell fails completely in his article to mention some of the biggest reasons why electronic information manipulation (the "paperless" office) is considered better than old-fashioned paper.
- Paper is untrackable and lacks meta-information (e.g. who made which edit, who entered data, when it was entered, etc.) Want to have a system that oversees air traffic control to help prevent collisions by projecting flight vectors in 3D space? Not happening when controllers log flights in chicken scratch on slips of paper. Want to understand an accident by retracing the actions of the controller? Also impossible. Much of the data about his actions and working data have been lost.
- Distance cripples physical medium usage. What if not everyone collaborating on a report is in the same place? Should they fax the copies all over, then attempt to reconcile all requested changes? I write specifications for teams in three states. If they want to look at my documents, they can bring them up in a moment. Would that be possible if I didn't keep the latest version (including suggested revisions and recent change lists) online in a networked server?
- Yes, many people can still work with stacks of papers on their desk - but you'll find it's mostly folks who set up their "mental system" before computers became commonplace. People claim paper is easier to sort through - but I can pull an email I've recieved on a topic, or my notes from a phone call, out of Outlook before someone with piles of identical white sheets of paper on their desk locates their notes. From the perspective of storing and retrieving information, paper is a usability nightmare.
Those are just a few of my thoughts, quickly, in response to Gladwell's article. It's obvious that he didn't spend much time talking with any proponents of increasing automation with knowledge work environments. Also, he fails to examine issues of intellectual property -- sure, one worker understand their piles, but if they quit, the company loses all that meta-data about what's in them and they become largely worthless (or worse, a burden that someone else has to sort out.) Examining things from the perspective of the individual worker alone isn't sufficient: you have to ask how it fits into the workplace as a whole.
