Whatever happened to the paperless office?

our regular studio is completely done being renovated. And it's a very very small office with a lot of computer and equipment, and it's quite warm. Yeah, we have all the lights off. Um, we're stripped down to just our our underwear. UM. I am, of course wearing the Batman under ru'se Um. Please help me. Yeah, last week it was The Wonder Woman once and I was told that was not appropriate. Uh So anyway, probably wouldn't have been such a big deal if you hadn't been walking around

the office afterward. It was the lariat that was really giving people the problem. It's like, tell me the truth. I really hope we're going to edit this out. No, this is gonna state Liz, this all states and alight once we're done. And Mr Fredericks in the background snickering. Uh no, here's the problem, folks. It's hot and I'm I'm punchy. So just just warning you before we really get into this this episode. But this episode does come to us courtesy of a little listener mail. This listener

mail comes from our our friend the scene. We've had him right in before. All right, So anyway, he says, Hi, j n C. I just wanted to give our first initial basis that's how good a friend he is, and any signs off tasks. So I just wanted to give a podcast suggestion because I don't remember hearing anything about it lately. I used to work as a docu management consultant, helping companies convert large filing systems of paper documents into

electronic files with a database for search and retrieval. So my question, slash suggestion, how far are we from the paperless office? Is this even a goal of organizations anymore? Thanks? Love the show, So we're going to talk about what the heck happened to the paperless office? Uh, this is something that we've been hearing about for decades, quite a

long time. And you all right, let me ask you this, Chris, from just your personal opinion, just technologically speaking and technologically only, do you think technologically we are at a point where a paperless office is possible? Not only yes, but I think we have been technologically at a point where it is possible to do it. I completely agree with you, Chris. Absolutely, we are at a point right now where we could go paperless if we really wanted to from the technological

standpoint point. But here's the here's the issue. It turns out that offices are full of these things we call um was it people and people work differently than technology. Uh. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is a good a good point that was made in the Myth of the Paperless Office. That's a book by Abigail Selling in Richard Harper, Yeah, which you can buy in print. Yeah, and not yes, you can. You can actually buy a print copy of the pattern. It is kind of funny. Um.

So the points actually a pretty interesting book. I'd like to go back and read it cover to cover because it's it's actually kind of interesting. Yeah. Well, the one of the points they make is that business evolved along with the use of paper, So with you know, paper wasn't an integral part of the way business started and and uh, and the way we think of business today, paper is a very important part of that and just taking it out of the equation just because you happen

to have a computer doesn't really work. Yeah, it's funny because they're they're trying to take back the idea of the paperless office to its roots. Um. And it was a Business Week article in nineties seventies and they were talking to uh, Xerox Park had George Pick who was talking about the Office of the Future. How many times have we talked about the Office of the Future on

the podcast? Um? But the funny thing is, uh, he didn't actually say that people have attributed it to him, But he didn't actually say that the Office of the Future would have no paper in it. In fact, that probably, as uh Selling and Harper point out, that probably would have been a very bad idea for him to say, since Xerox makes copiers. Um. But uh, you know it. But he said that, you know, there are technologies that

are changing. The typewriter is going to go away, was one of them, and I think people sort of extrapolated from there. But I mean even um, in Dan Norman's book The Invisible Computer h. Thomas Edison, you know, they were talking about some of the recording technology that he came up with, you know, the cylinders, the black cylinders, and people would be able to make a recording of something and give it to someone else, so they wouldn't necessarily have to write out a memo to give to

somebody else in the office. They could actually give you the recording, um and pass that around or you know, Veneva bushes memex from uh you know, as we may think back in the Atlantic article and that's another really good article to read if you're interested in if you had this idea, how um this sort of foreshadowed and sort of became a self fulfilling prophecy of the internet, that you would have a desk where you had all your materials and you would store them all on microfilm

because again the internet he hadn't been invented yet. Um. But rather than you know, keeping a desk full of files and file folders and stuff on paper, you would basically take a snapshot of it and put it on microfilm, which is much smaller and more convenient to store. Um. You know. So people had a number of different ideas that had led up to it, and you know when they actually started thinking about the concept of well, you know, we could we could scannal this stuff in and store it.

It would be so easy to go without paper. But yes, as it turns out, on a computer screen, you can't spread it all over your desk and see how everything fits together, or you know, tack it up to the wall. Or let's say that you have a report and the points you really want to hit in the report when you're making your presentation are on pages one and seven. It's very easy to take page one and then take page seven and leave everything else behind in a physical format.

Now you can do that electronically too, don't get me wrong, but there's an extra step there. I mean, you've got that interface that you have to work with with the computer. With paper, you literally pick up one sheet of paper, pick up a second sheet of paper, and you're done, right, So I mean, there's no dealing with anything else. It

is a very fast system. Um there. So paper has a real use in business and uh and and there's ah, so there's there's that part where paper and business are so closely entwined that uh that a truly paperless office is a difficult thing to manage. It's not impossible. There are offices that have done it, or at least have reduced paper to such an extent that you could more or less call them paperless. But for the most part, most businesses still rely, at least in some measure on

paper because it's useful. It's useful, and it's easy, and we we have it culturally ingrained in us to use paper. Yep. UM. When you think about it, to paper is a form of technology. It's just a form of technology that's been ubiquitous for so long that we don't even think of it's being that way. It's there, but it is high tech we think about it. UM. It stays around for

a very long time. I mean the quality of ink and the quality of paper that we have now, UM it's a lot more likely to last fifteen years than a particular file format. UM. That doesn't mean that we can't fix that, but the way things have been involving right now. UM libraries, for example, have have a very difficult time with this because UM file formats have been changing, the machines that play different kinds of file formats, changed the programs that are used. They go out of date.

So the thing is, you have a you know, for example, we'll take from some something from my background, something I wrote in scribble for the Commodore Amiga, and I have it stored on a three point five inch floppy disc that I wrote out in college. Now I was, you know about let's say twenty years ago, which it was just about it's twenty years old. Something that I wrote on a piece of paper from that time would be perfectly legible and well, it would be perfectly readable by

handwriting analysis person um. But the thing is, if I wanted to read the file on that floppy disc number one, I would have to hope that the material, the magnetic medium, hadn't corrupted. You know, I'd become so brittle by this point that it is, uh, you know, unreadable. I would have funding to Megat to run it on. I would have funding to me with scribble on it, and it's rendered almost inaccessible. So yeah, it's so difficult to get to.

Now the Internet has managed to take a lot of those concerns and kind of put them to the side, just from the sense that you can store things in the cloud now and even as as companies upgrade their cloud systems, they of course have to port old information over. I mean, if they can't, then they're going to go out of business. But that's expensive because it takes people to port that stuff over, and you also have to

file formats and storage capacity and all that stuff. You know, It's it ain't cheap, right, But the point being that it is it is in fact possible for you to now store things electronically where you don't have to worry as much about the physical medium or the or the

even the software um going bad on you. I think, especially when you have access to things like say Google Docs or the Microsoft Online Suite UM, those you know, usually build backwards compatibility into that, and even if the backwards compatibility starts to kind of slack off later on, they'll probably just go ahead and tweak it so that you can you can convert your files over into the

proper format. But that that aside, I think just psychologically, there's an importance we put on things that are put on paper that we don't think of an electronic format um. And this is kind of armchair psychology. So I mean this is this is not based on anything scientific or any studies. This is Jonathan talking out of his own armchair psychology. Lazy boy. So, uh I see what you did there. Yeah, it's kind of hard to fit it in the office, and boy is it getting warm in here.

But uh so, the armchair psychology approach is that when you have something written down on paper, it's it's got a physical presence, right. You can see it, you can touch it, you can pick it, you can wat it up if you want to. You can throw it away. Um, you can file it. You can tell your assistant to go and unfile it. Find that piece of paper that you've filed for no reason other than to make that person go and get it back for you because you're

powerful man, Mr Executive. How you like me now, boss? Give me the Stevenson report. I think I think it went off on the rails on that one. But at any rate, the point being that it has that physicality to it, and that's that's an important factor. When you have an electronic file, you know you've got it. It doesn't it doesn't it feels like it doesn't really exist. You know, it exists on a computer screen. But once you turn your computer off, you don't have it in

your hands anymore. You know, you have to have the computer onto or some other device, whether it's a Kindle or other e reader or a smartphone or whatever whatever it is you're using to access that file. Um, you know you have to have this other device on in order to access it. And it just doesn't feel like

it's real, not like not like a piece of paper does. Now, if you can get over that, that's cool, But if you can't, then you're gonna be like a boss I had several years ago at a different company, and I'm not gonna name it, but I really did have a boss who would get maybe fifty or sixty emails in a day, and he printed every single one of them

and then filed them away. Yeah. I know I know other people like that too, And uh, you know I know a lot of people two in places that I've worked, actually, very various companies from where I've worked, and I'll print something that I need and I'll walk over to the printer and it will be next to the Actually have

mentioned this on the podcast before. For you long time listeners you will recognize this, But um, there there will be a stack of paper, you know, sometimes even you know, a whole pack worth of paper sitting next to the printer of jobs that people have printed but never claimed. Um. You know, so they people get it in their head that they need a copy of it, and they print it out, and then they forget that they actually needed it, and it turns out they didn't need it as bad

badly as they thought. Well, what's funny because another one of the things too that I've read was an article in The Economist, um and in the eighties and nine nineties, UM, during the years when technology was really beginning to catch on and people started having a computer on their desk, uh sometimes at home too, especially in the early eighties. You know, that was a real novelty, UM for the

early part of the decade. But consumption, you know, this is when theoretically the Office of the Future was going to start eliminating paper. But at that point, consumption of paper almost you know, more than doubled in those years because you know, once the Internet caught on, there was all this other information and people wanted copies of it. So, you know, in printers became really really good. Desktop publishing became a phenomenon and all of a sudden, we were

printing way more than usual. But since two thousand one, apparently paper used to spend in decline um and seems like social factors may be partially responsible for that because people are growing up, they're they're used to the technology. Now I don't necessarily need to print the emails and

file them away. People who have, you know, gone through school all the way through with you know, and they're used to do the computer and the internet, and they don't have to They just don't need to print stuff out like they used to. So it's it's starting to decline, but it's still it's definitely it's definitely a cultural thing. I think if I think as we go on, we will arrive at more of are less a paperless office

kind of environment across most industries. Uh, mainly because by then it'll those industries will be staffed by people who grew up in that environment that you were talking about. For those of us who who came before, you know, we were just from a different time where it's a time from far past where we just are used to

using paper and it's hard to get that. It's hard to to break free of that, which is why if you if you are a company and you're looking at um switching to a paperless environment, it really means changing more than just telling people not to print stuff. It means creating new organizational workflows. It really means rethinking the way you go about doing your daily job so that you don't have to rely on paper at all. UM.

And it's more than just providing the tools. You have to provide the training, and you have to expect that there's gonna be a period where people have to learn these new these new behaviors. This is not what we're used to and UM, I think we will see that happen over time, but it's gonna be much more gradual than we expected because I think when people were making the predictions, they were thinking of it from a technological standpoint,

like when will we be technologically able to abandon paper? Well, as it turns out that we were ready for that

far before we were psychologically ready to do it. I could think of a number of different programs available right now, um commercially and as shareware that allow you to uh, you know, save different kinds of documents in them, so you can create a system inside the program for your Microsoft word documents and your rich text files and your audio files and PDFs and all kinds of things, and you can basically create a I mean, you could do the same thing essentially with a UM you know, with

a simple organizational file in your operating system. But this pro the programs actually sort of put them together so that you have all the files in one place where you can view them inside the system. And that's it essentially achieves the same um the same idea of having them all in a file, a physical file folder. But you know, it does help people keep things organized and help you work without having to, you know, spread all

that stuff out on your desk. However, spreading all that stuff out on your desk can be really helpful sometimes sometimes that that is, it's all easier to visualize the project when you actually have those physical pieces in front of you. Maybe something like the Microsoft Surface, you know, where you can we could have a screen, a large screen where you could you know, actually spread things out.

Think about interoperability between say a computer and a tablet device, like if if you if Apple were to create uh an interoperable interface between the iPad and say their Macintosh line, and they were able to make it where it was really easy to do things like have one thing up on your IMAX screen while you're taking notes on your iPad, and it's all linked together so that if you ever open it up again, you have access to all of that.

That would be brilliant. And then I would say, you know, before I kind of poo pooed the iPad um and and I think in its initial phase it's still not really for me. But seeing that kind of stuff built in over time, and I assume that that's going to eventually happen, if not with the iPad one point kind of yeah, some sort of tablet device, um, then I would say, yeah, you know, this totally makes sense because that's one of my problems is I like to take

a lot of notes about the research I'm doing. Well, it's it's a lot easier if you are doing that on paper than if you're doing it on a screen, where like, if the resource material is on the screen, then you're either covering up part of the screen or you need two screens. And most of us here at how stuff works, we only have the one laptop. There are some of us who have multiple screens. I am

not one of them. Uh, if I did on multiple screens, then I could have my notes up on one and I could have the research up on the other, it wouldn't be an issue. But like a tablet device could be helpful in that sense. Otherwise I'm using paper. Um, so yeah, there's that. And there's a lot of reasons why you would want to switch to a paperless office. I mean, first of all, it's the green thing to do. You're not consuming right, or at least you're not consuming paper,

you're still consuming electricity. So and there's still other issues to take into account. But some people say that that paper is greener than electronics that but I've but I've seen I've seen some new material to from environmental groups that say, well, you know, with certain responsibly forested trees, with a higher recycled paper content, it can be have less of an impact on the environment, which is just

hard for me to get my head around. But you would have to sort of understand what you have to be purchasing your paper from a very particular vendor, and I guarantee you it's going to be more expensive than the average REMA paper, yes, and probably more than a company wouldn't necessarily be willing to pay. But yeah, most companies are gonna look for the most cost effective way of purchasing anything well could otherwise it's hard to stay

in business. But the the reasons why you want to go to paperless besides the whole green slash clean technology, It takes up less space, so that can save you money because now you're not you know, you might not need an office space as large as you would if

you had a lot of paper files. I mean, I've worked in offices that had an entire room dedicated to paper files that with like multiple UH sliding shelves, like you'd have to turn a crank to move the shelf down the rooms we could get to the next shelf, and if if the information you needed was on the last shelf, was going to take you a while before

you got there. Um, you wouldn't need that. With electronic electronic filing systems, everything would be on a server or two servers or a rack of servers whatever, you wouldn't. That takes up a lot less space than an entire room full of files and UH and like for very big companies that could that could mean the difference between

a huge office and just a rather large office. Well, and and it's gonna be especially important in situations like the ones we're starting to encounter now in which more of us are working from home more of the time. I mean, there are companies who are taking the plunge and going completely decentralized. And if you have a lot of paper, uh, you know you have to have all the files. Well, what if somebody across town needs that? Are you going to pay a career? Are you're gonna

run it over there yourself? Again, this is a higher environmental cost um and it's really really impractical, you know, rather than sharing the files electronically in some fashion. So, um, you know now that that more companies are becoming comfortable allowing their employees to work remotely carrying around a lot of paper in a briefcase or backpacker a truck, it's kind of it's kind of uh, really difficult to imagine

at this point. The nice thing about where we work is that there's not a lot of call for us to print paper. Most of the things that we do we can do electronically at this point. Um, it may mean logging into three separate log in systems in order to get to the electronic form, these things happen. Yeah, but yeah, that that does happen, but it still means you don't need paper for it. So that's kind of nice. Um.

But will we get to a paperless office environment? Probably, but it'll be a generational thing, not a not a technology thing. Yeah. I think we'll probably get to a very very minimal paper office. It just doesn't sound nearly as cool as paperless, right, And I mean, I remember when I was took my first computer class. I was like, yeah, totally, we're not gonna have any paper anymore. Yeah, And now I'm like, hey, where to put that piece of paper

with that extremely funny and important note I wrote on it? Yeah? And where are you gonna put that password? Yea, stick it on your computer monitor. I always end up putting it on a little post it note, And then I just put it on Sarah Dowdy's back, and then I come by and say, hey, how are you doing? All right? That's how I log in. She hates that, by the way. Meanwhile she peels it off and goes one six Yeah, yeah, last word, why is the word password on my back?

I never shut up. I never claimed to be smart, all right, So well, that's that's a good discussion on the paperless office in it. And now we will move on to a little listener mail. This strom mail comes from Lisa, and Lisa says chris P. I thought it was crispy until Jonathan explained in the later podcast. And Jonathan, I just want you guys to know how much I love and enjoy your podcast. I travel all over Florida for my job, so I plug in my eye touch

and listen to you. I learned so much and you always managed to a listen to smile from me as well. I also want to mention that I love it when Jonathan says, oh, listener mail, I love that. I have so many things I'd like to hear on your podcast, but one that often comes up because I'm always looking for directions is how does Google get the street views on Google Maps? Thanks and keep up the great work, Lisa. Well, Lisa,

thank you so much. It was a very nice email to receive, especially after a very long and hectic week in a very hot studio room. Yes, I am getting to the point where I am in fact crispy. Yes, yes I'm kind of getting soggy. But let's just move on and answer your your question there about street you, Well, we talked about street you in a previous podcast. Not well, it was actually quite a while ago. But street view

is it's a pretty simple and and brilliant idea. What do you do is you get a car or in some cases a trike or maybe even a bicycle, but mostly cars, and you put on top of it four cameras panoramic cameras, so yeah, wide angle cameras pointing one essentially north, southeast, and west, but really in the four main directions radiating out from the roof of the vehicle. Yeah. There their photos of this, ironically enough online and you can see it essentially looks like a periscope on a submarine.

It's a mass with the four cameras mountain on it, and they're digital cameras. They're taking Hiro's photos and they take them at a pretty short interval. Um. I'm not sure if it's timed or if it's actually distance now that I think about it, but they are GEO tagged. There's a GPS receiver in with the vehicle and it tags each photo with a compass as well, So there's a GPS tag and a compass heading for each photo so that it knows how to orient them when putting

them together in street view. So when it's all put together in street view, it kind of looks like a seamless experience. Like you can you can scan down the street and travel down the street as if you were actually in the town. Um that's all because of these

these photos. Now, however, if you do take a turn and you start moving around, you might notice that the time of day looks a little different, or maybe the maybe it's not as sunny as it used to being because it takes a while to scan these streets, and depending on traffic and things like that, it can take a long time. So Google sends these vehicles through, takes all these photos and then assembles them and uh and and attaches them to Google Maps because of the using

the geo tagging feature. Um there are This is not without controversy. There There have been a few towns that have protested the use of of street view saying that it it's a violation of privacy and that it endangers people in the town because, uh, it could it could serve as a way for thieves to case a joint. That's what we call it. When we UH I mean when thieves look at houses and try to find a

vulnerable way in. Um. It also could capture people in unflattering situations such as coming out of of the Cheetah, which only a few people are going to actually know. But listen, don't look it up. Don't look it up. It's a look. It's an exotic dancing location within Atlanta, And the only reason I know that it exists is because I used to work there block away from there, and um so if you know, you wouldn't want to

the Google. You wouldn't want to be walking out of there and see the Google car going by at that moment and think, great, my picture is gonna be on Google street View forever. So that's why the Google street View Now they have an automatic UH algorithm that will blur out people's faces so that their identities remain somewhat secret. Um.

But there are other issues as well. In fact, Google has has mentioned not that long ago that they were thinking about letting communities know when they were going to send a car through. And when you think about at first, you're like, oh, that's a great idea because I can make sure that my my lawn is his mode. So it doesn't look nasty, and that that you know, the

houses in good shapes. So that way, if the if I ever do decide to sell my house and someone looks at my house and street view, it's not gonna look like a you know, a ramshackle hut. But other people are thinking, hey, this is great because if I know they're going to be going through, I can arrange a really funny tableau and uh and mess with Google and have like this goofy scene play out as the Google street view UH car goes by. Because this has

happened before with some art project type stuff. I can just imagine the entire world turning into an enormous art project, which in my view is totally awesome. But other people say, well that kind of reduces the usefulness of the actual tool. Um that more than answers that question. I think Chris has been quiet ever since I talked about the cheetah. Yeah, I'm wondering in the paperless office if I should tender my resignation on paper. I think you can do it

by email or even text message. You know what, I'm going to tweet it when I'm out of here. I'm tweeting it. You heard it here first, so I accept that for the fact that I'm following in the footsteps of of people who are like C. E O S who have used Twitter to Yeah. Well, at any rate, thank you for the question. If any of you have any similar questions or just you're curious about something or you want to add to our discussion, please email us text stuff at how stuff works dot com. Remember you

can check out our blogs. Those are at blogs dot how stuff works dot com, and of course the website itself, how stuff works dot Com still an awesome resource. And you know what, you don't even need paper to look at it. Nope, and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon for moral on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com And be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage, brought to

you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you