A familiar fallacy in philosophy comes to us in the traditional Latin form, post hoc ergo propter hoc—"After this, therefore because of this.” Most people intuitively understand the weakness of the inference, even if they’re not logicians.
A trickier notion, lacking a canonical Latin phrase, is: “After this, therefore better than this.” Try that one on the folks sleeping outside Apple stores when the newest iPad or iPhone is about to go on sale. Not so intuitive a fallacy to them, or to many others.
Later must be better, right?
The power of logic being its generality, you could explore the after/better issue in any area of human existence. Second husband versus first husband. Marvin Hamlisch versus Mozart. JetBlue versus horse and buggy (a mode of transport rarely canceled because of light mist in the air). Let’s stick here to a matter that absorbs almost everyone who cares about books, journals, newspapers, language, learning.
Digital versus print. Digital versus paper.
If you’re older than 50, with a career long tied to print and paper, you probably recall your own moment when the tipping point away from paper appeared irrevocable. Mine arrived in “Philosophical Problems of Journalism,” a seminar I’d been offering for years. The syllabus ritually required students to bring a copy of the print New York Times on the day that our weekly class met. About five years ago, I noticed a new phenomenon, one grown worse over time.
At the end of class, almost all students left their print copies on the seminar table. If they decided to investigate the day’s Times later on, they’d do it online. In more-recent offerings of the class, only threat of failure for not regularly obtaining a print copy ensures that students will comply with the syllabus. It’s as if you were asking them to buy a radioactive fish sprinkled with asbestos, rather than an older technology that merely smudges their hands. Paper newspaper? That’s something Grandpa and Grandma read.
This veteran of 30 years of newspaper work at The Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere knew at that moment that the broadsheet industry had lost its “paper battle,” even if the final surrender would not come for decades. When it still seemed winnable, I often argued that if advertising could make something as stupid and self-destructive as smoking seem cool, then it could make newspapers hip once again—think Bogart in Deadline U.S.A. (1952)—even for the digital generation. But newspapers surrendered the paper battle without a shot, and now they’re fighting for their lives, paywall or no paywall.
The next graveyard for paper, many fear, will be books—now sometimes charmingly cited in the bibliographies of student papers as “print books.” We’ve watched the collapse of Borders and the rise of Amazon.com. The ascent of e-books, Kindles, smartphones, tablets, and the rest—if lately tapering off a bit, according to industry statistics—continues. A couple of years ago, at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest (a name that may be in danger), a nationally famous middle-aged writer buttonholed me: Did I know about an astonishing change in the boilerplate of a major publisher’s standard author contract?
Paper can’t easily be separated from the cultural and sociological contexts of its usage. If we abandon it thoughtlessly in one venue or another, we may pay prices we don’t anticipate.
The publisher now included, in complex gobbledygook, a clause that said it “does not guarantee the production of a print edition.”
The indignant author immediately directed his renowned barracuda agent to strike the clause, even though his editor sought to soothe his fears by assuring that, “Of course, the clause does not apply to you.” The publisher, nonetheless, had plainly surmised that book publishing’s day of reckoning might come at any instant. And in a world where authors secure their contracts in one decade and often deliver manuscripts in another, a publisher can’t be too careful.
And yet there is a counternarrative brought to us, unsurprisingly, by those rectangular wonders called books (no qualifier, please). When Nicholas A. Basbanes’s On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) arrived a couple of months ago, I sensed that a rebuttal that had been building since The Myth of the Paperless Office, by Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper (MIT Press, 2002), had now received its corroborative coda.
Not because Basbanes—who had retooled himself from Worcester Sunday Telegram books editor into our top writerly bibliophile with lovely literary expeditions such as A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (Henry Holt and Company, 1995)—is a philosopher of paper. No, because he’s an old-fashioned scoop-up-everything (as his subtitle indicates) reporter, who lets gathered facts tell his tale.
Will paper survive or disappear? Basbanes has the goods. First comes the minihistory of his subject worldwide. Then he floats a clinical definition of his subject—"a composite of water and pulverized cellulose fragments screened through a sieve and dried into a flat film"—that signals the relentless attention he’ll give to the physical creation of paper, a focus that at first suggests On Papermaking might have been his proper title.
Soon enough, however, Basbanes is working all the angles—how our language teems with “paper” metaphors and clichés, how Leonardo, Beethoven, and Edison would be unimaginable without paper, how its presence in architecture, espionage, gunnery, bureaucracy, and science practically determined those practices. Basbanes is a power hitter whose grand slam brings home other recent appreciators of paper.
The Myth of the Paperless Office makes a convenient starting point for tracing the recent counternarrative in the paper/digital contretemps. In that shrewd study, Sellen and Harper—now principal researchers at Microsoft Research Cambridge who, incidentally, joined their lives together with a familiar piece of paper—argued that while one need only “to look at any workplace to see how firmly paper is woven into the fabric of our lives,” too often “paper is seen to symbolize an old-fashioned past, and a move away from it is viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a move toward a more efficient and effective future.” Yet they were convinced that the paperless office “is truly a myth,” as both reality and aspiration.
They argued their case through statistical evidence, case study, and insightful sociological explanation. The web, they noted, increased the amount of home printing and consumption of paper. Office use constituted less than half the total paper consumption in the United States and Britain. Globally, the production of paper over 17 years showed a “steady, steep increase.” One study they examined showed that the installation of copiers was slowly growing, while over a five-year period, printers were added by 600 percent.
“We have heard stories of paperless offices,” they joked, “but we have never seen one.”
Analytically, the authors found that “people stick with paper despite the burgeoning of digital devices” because paper and work practices evolved together, digital alternatives to paper too often prove “inadequately designed for the tasks at hand,” and paper is “the best choice for some tasks"—whatever the claims of high-pressure salespeople of digital devices.
For Sellen and Harper, the idea that “there are always benefits to going paperless” was another “myth.” Many observers found that myth so hard to question, they concluded, because “getting rid of paper often assumes a symbolic role in office life,” one that interferes with understanding underlying problems in a particular area of work. Their case studies—of air-traffic control, police work, chocolate manufacturing, high-tech research, telecommunications installation, and other enterprises—solidified their optimism about paper.
In the decade or so since The Myth of the Paperless Office, other excellent books have argued that paper can’t easily be separated from the cultural and sociological contexts of its usage, warning that if we abandon it thoughtlessly in one venue or another, we may pay prices we don’t anticipate.
Parchment, Paper, Pixels: Law and the Technologies of Communication (University of Chicago Press, 2010), by Peter M. Tiersma, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, expertly traced how the changing technology of legal documentation (e.g., contracts, statutes, judicial opinions) could lead to substantive differences, requiring us to attend carefully to how we juxtapose forms of recording law and the law’s larger goals.
Why, Tiersma asked, does the law of wills remain hostile to electronic testamentary documents? Because strict rules make it easier to confirm the intentions of those committing to bequests. Tiersma cautioned that “it matters whether we make law by oral decree, by chiseling edicts into stone, by enacting written text that is spread far and wide on parchment or printed copies, or by typing on a computer keyboard and posting the result on a website.” So, for instance, easy-to-access far-flung judicial opinions may favor, in the future, close readings of nonauthoritative rulings more than independent reasoning.
As if taking up Tiersma’s charge, Jean-François Blanchette, in Burdens of Proof: Cryptographic Culture and Evidence Law in the Age of Electronic Documents (MIT, 2012), demonstrated in the course of an incisive discussion of cryptography how the quest for authentic, authoritative electronic signatures on legal documents requires continuity with our predigital notions of authenticity, which are rooted in paper. “Paper records (and paperwork),” he wrote, “form the material foundation on which legitimacy and the day-to-day operation of the nation-state rests—from the Constitution itself, to birth certificates, voting ballots, judgments, real-estate deeds, and so on.”
Blanchette, an associate professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, properly went on to cite an observation of Bruno Latour, apropos of a certain digital-age sneering toward paper: “Common sense ironically makes fun of these ‘gratte papiers’ and ‘paper shufflers,’ and often wonders what all this ‘red tape’ is for; but the same question should be asked of the rest of science and technology. In our cultures, ‘paper shuffling’ is the source of an essential power, that constantly escapes attention since its materiality is ignored.”
A fine companion volume to Blanchette appeared the same year: Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books). In it, the associate professor of media theory and history at New York University probed the role of paperwork as a fount of state power, revisiting bureaucracy in the French Revolution to show how lives could be saved by making records disappear. The questions Kafka asked—among them, “What do we want from our paperwork? What depends on it? Who depends on it? How do we insure its success? How do we prepare for its failure?"—indicated that they have to be asked over and over again as the materiality of recordkeeping changes.
While not a tub-thumper for paper, Kafka acknowledged that “media historians and theorists” have long appreciated “the astounding affordability, versatility, portability, and durability of paper.” But that didn’t obviate the same overarching question that so many writers in this area confront: “Will the computer ever replace paperwork?”
The serious scholarship cited above has slowly rendered simplistic predictions of paper’s demise plainly superficial. But for the coup de grâce, I prefer Basbanes: rambunctiously journalistic, endlessly maneuvering for a fresh angle on his topic, explaining the physics and chemistry of paper as he chronicles its business history, and sketching the lives of people devoted to it—such as that of MacArthur Fellow Timothy Barrett, a master craftsman and papermaking historian at the University of Iowa.
Basbanes stands firm as his subject’s advocate and lover: “Paper is light, absorbent, strong, plentiful, and portable; you can fold it, mail it, coat it with wax and waterproof it, wrap gunpowder or tobacco in it, boil tea in it.” Paper, he shows the reader, is not just a commodity but a world, and worlds don’t disappear so easily. Scholarly discussion of paper’s future, he says, usually focuses too narrowly on “tools in the modern office or how reading and writing habits are being redefined.” It forgets about all the other paper that surrounds us.
But Basbanes, thankfully, provides the sweep of information that makes breaking down the “Whither Paper” question clear and necessary. What of personal hygiene? With such paper products, Basbanes points out, “the question is rarely whether consumers will continue to use bathroom tissue, but whether fiber from virgin wood should be used to produce the levels of softness they have come to expect, or be replaced by a coarser product made from ‘postconsumer recycled waste.’” He persuades us that paper operates in so many different niches of our lives, from origami to the restroom, that generalizing about future paper production is a dangerous game.
Driving that notion are sections of his book such as one on the Glatfelter company in Pennsylvania, which supplies paper for almost 1,000 products, including Hallmark greeting cards; U.S. stamps and Priority Mail envelopes; Salada, Tetley, and Twinings tea bags; Crayola crayon wrap; and Kotex release liners. Basbanes details the immense resourcefulness with which paper producers adapt to changing practices, in many cases expanding their businesses by filling demands for an enormous range of products. (A few years ago, the British Association of Paper Historians said there were roughly 20,000 commercial uses of paper).
Some of those, Basbanes makes clear, are unlikely to change. The advent of toilet paper in the 19th century, by providing “a physical barrier between fecal excretion and the hand” (wrote Dr. Walter T. Hughes, an expert on the subject), did an enormous amount to forestall infectious diseases such as dysentery and typhoid. Do we now envision a digital replacement for toilet paper? We might, here in the United States, switch to strategically placed jets of water and electronically cued dryers (resembling practices elsewhere)—perhaps by logging on to some contraption when we finish our business. Don’t hold your breath.
Although most of the time Basbanes maintains a tone of reportorial “objectivity” as he gambols on about adhesive postage stamps, NSA pulping of documents, historic archives, the book-arts movement, or whatever’s next on his “paper” agenda, his optimism about paper is clear—sometimes communicated in his own voice, sometimes by holding up his tape recorder.
“I’m not sure why anyone would want a paperless society anyway,” says Douglas A. Crane, a seventh-generation executive with Crane & Company, which disdains wood pulp as it produces all U.S. currency and, Basbanes reports, 60 percent of the world’s banknotes. “What’s the benefit there?” Paper, he says, “is such an effective way of delivering information. Readers get to read it when they want to, they don’t have to turn on a power button, it’s very portable, it’s extraordinarily convenient.”
Basbanes offers other pro-paper reasons as well. Like Blanchette, he notes that “the impulse to ‘keep a hard copy’ remains central to bureaucratic culture, and is sure to endure despite the arrival of electronic recordkeeping.” And his observations about the dangers of the eclipse of paper recordkeeping at government agencies such as the NSA now read as both ironic and spot on. “With so much material now being ‘born digital’ and stored in computers instead of file cabinets,” he writes, “the likelihood of a security breach has increased exponentially.” One senior intelligence analyst confides to Basbanes, himself a former naval officer: “Very simply stated, paper is safer.”
Should paper disappear, we will, to be sure, need to abandon endless metaphorical phrases in English, from “paper tiger” to “paper thin.” But such predictions are almost certainly not worth the paper they’re printed on. The other day, even The New York Times—always essential to determining which way the zeitgeist is blowing—got on board with the counternarrative. David Carr, its closest figure to a media guru, celebrated the decision of Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired and cyberphilosopher extraordinaire, to take thousands of reviews of “neat stuff” that he’d gathered on his website, Cool Tools, and publish them as an old-fashioned print catalog.
“Print continues to be a remarkable technology,” declared Carr, “if not as lucrative as it used to be, with its own durable glories.”
Since paper exists, he might have said, we don’t have to invent it.
