Paper beats Rock, Paper also beats Computer

Statistics Canada released a study recently entitled Our lifes in digital times, with one standout result:

The arrival of the personal computer gave much talk to the "paperless office". However, between 1983 and 2003, consumption of paper for printing and writing alone more than doubled... Similarly, volumes of postal mail have been rising, although the composition of mail has changed, and couriers and local messengers are proliferating. This is the case even as Internet usage and e-mail are high in Canada. Link

That we are no closer to the paperless office today is no surprise. Thomas Landauer and other computer critics warned us about this in the 1990s, and I recently spent time flipping through magazine advertisements from the mid 1980s which rated a personal computer's storage capacity in terms of typewritten pages, a delicious irony to say the least.