Money-saving tips from a gal desperate to develop good spending & saving habits! What more could you ask for?
Friday, April 2, 2010
computers don't save me paper
Isn't it sad that we're supposed to be in a paperless era, that computers are supposed to save us so much paper, and yet in the end they only seem to generate more paper?
The reason that computers don't save people paper is because as much as we like to pretend that we are a digital society, we're still prejudiced toward reading things on paper especially when editing. As wonderful as the markup features on modern word processors are, they still seem to lack some of the simple elegance of scribbling notes in the margin; I think I sent 6 or 7 drafts of an abstract to my supervisor before he approved it, and that's one of the least wasteful "paper madness" stories I can think of. There's a host of executive-types who still insist on having their e-mail printed out for them, and until recently radiologists still loved looking at images on film rather than on a computer monitor even if the original device that acquired them was digitally based.
It may sound a little callous, but if using a computer for work results in a person producing more paper then they're doing SOMETHING wrong. The old standby of not seeing errors in a document until they're printed out can probably be remedied by simply taking a *gasp* break for about 2 minutes before looking at the document again, or viewing it in a different layout (print it to PDF then view, switch to a 2-page view, etc.). After doing those things, it really cut down on my digitally-produced paper output!
The reason that computers don't save people paper is because as much as we like to pretend that we are a digital society, we're still prejudiced toward reading things on paper especially when editing. As wonderful as the markup features on modern word processors are, they still seem to lack some of the simple elegance of scribbling notes in the margin; I think I sent 6 or 7 drafts of an abstract to my supervisor before he approved it, and that's one of the least wasteful "paper madness" stories I can think of. There's a host of executive-types who still insist on having their e-mail printed out for them, and until recently radiologists still loved looking at images on film rather than on a computer monitor even if the original device that acquired them was digitally based.
ReplyDeleteIt may sound a little callous, but if using a computer for work results in a person producing more paper then they're doing SOMETHING wrong. The old standby of not seeing errors in a document until they're printed out can probably be remedied by simply taking a *gasp* break for about 2 minutes before looking at the document again, or viewing it in a different layout (print it to PDF then view, switch to a 2-page view, etc.). After doing those things, it really cut down on my digitally-produced paper output!