The Power of Paper

Article • 672 Words • Paper, Technology, 2023 • 01/24/2023

Introduction

I have not always been someone who so strongly believed in the “power of paper”. I have really bad handwriting, and so when I was a kid everyone would tell me that I needed to fix my handwriting, to which I always replied, “In the future, everything will be typed, I won’t need to write anything.” Years later, I am willing to concede that I have been proven wrong, people still do write things and I don’t think that we’re going to stop anytime soon.

What’s even stranger is that while I love Notion and Google Docs for a lot of my work, I still will write my TODO lists on paper and whiteboard out my thoughts. What gives? I have a few ideas why physical books and journals have endured for so long. Then I will talk about why I think paper apps are uniquely positioned to leverage a lot of these factors.

The Advantages of Physical Manipulation

The advantage of being something that you can touch and freely manipulate are manifold: visually, interactively, and cognitively.

If you want to searching for something in a rush, you can quickly flip through a book. When you are reading, you can see and feel how much left you have in the book. When you annotate a book with sticky notes, you can see your work all at a glance. While the Kindle has replicated all these features, it lacks the visual impact and context of the physical version. The Kindle even has features that books never could replicate like directly looking something up in the dictionary, or being able to instantly rent a book from the library, but that is not enough to drive super widespread adoption (20-90 million is a lot of Kindles) but 92.6 million people go to library events alone, that is not even speaking to how many people check out books there.

There is no latency with physical objects, I don’t have to unlock my phone and open up my Notes app to add TODOs with a piece of paper. And with whiteboarding, I feel like there is a certain resistance of the application to input, you have to do a lot in order to do simple things, when it would have been much easier to just do on paper. While you could trying emulating writing on paper on an iPad, I find that it feels awkward.

There are even cognitive benefits too, research shows that people who write their notes remember more; Scientists Recommend Swapping the Keyboard for Pen & Paper.

Searching for paper information is both faster and slower, depending on tasks.

There is keyword search on digital but this can be slow or unreliable in a lot of digital platforms
if you were to randomly click on a bunch of notes vs flip through pages trying to find something physically i think it would be easier on paper because theres no loading time latency and much more ergonomic

The Benefits of Low Tech

The idea of “unplugging” is very appealing to a lot of people, in particular ones that feel negative effects from being connected all the time (see: doomscrolling). In some ways, we are seeing a cultural reaction to this, like the popularity of Cottagecore on TikTok for example. We are able to romanticize a life connected to nature and away from certain modernities like the Internet.

No Time To Pause: The Dark Side Of The Attention Economy

What motivates ‘tech-free’ Silicon Valley parents to enrol their children in makerspaces?

While paper is not great for the environment, there are ways to do it sustainably by thinning forests (which is actually necessary for healthy forests) and replanting, or recycling consumer paper. Unless your electricity is from all renewable sources, sometimes a Word Document could have a larger carbon footprint than a stack of paper.

Is digital really greener than paper?

Low-tech and its benefits for sustainability - Bio Based Press

Is it better for the planet to read online or in a paper format?

The Power of Paper

Introduction

The Advantages of Physical Manipulation

The Benefits of Low Tech

External Links Cited

Other Posts About “Paper”

Other Posts About “Technology”

Comments