Whatever happened to "The Leisure Society?"

[pastortoy]

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation - EFFector Online Issue 4.01

Tom Forester, Senior Lecturer, School of Computing & Information Technology, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia:

The "paperless" office now looks to be one of the funniest predictions made about the social impact of IT. More and more trees are being felled to satisfy our vast appetite for paper, in offices which were supposed by now to be all-electronic. In the US, paper consumption has rocketed 320 per cent over the past 30 years, ahead of real GDP which has gone up 280 per cent (Tenner 1988). In absolute terms, this means that US consumers gobbled up about 4 trillion pages of paper last year, compared with only 2.5 trillion in 1986 - about the time that word processors and personal computers were becoming really popular. The two most successful office products of recent times - the photocopier and the fax machine - are of course enormous users or generators of paper, while technologies which do not use paper - such as electronic mail and voice mail - have been slow to catch on.

http://w2.eff.org/effector/effect04.01