With my background in information science (I worked in libraries for several years before shifting to focus more on administration and legal writing), this assignment for Introduction to Law was a blast from the past.

The dream of the paperless office has been around since at least the late 1970s and, like Chinese democracy, always seems to be ten years away. The rise of broadband modems, wireless internet, and affordable electronic storage may mean that soon we really will hit a record low in office paper consumption…although as an archivist and thus a professional musty paper enthusiast I seriously doubt that our society will ever go truly paperless. “Different technologies have different affordances”, as my iSchool professors used to say. The physicality and scribblability of paper are just better for a certain subset of tasks, just as the accessibility and duplicability of electronic documents are just better for others.

I’m still very glad my parents paid for those touch-typing lessons back in grade school, though.