social media – Legal (Para)Eagle: Kimberley Hoff's legal blog

Continuing on in the spirit of my post on “The Dream of the Paperless Office”, this is a research piece I did for Computers and the Law as a make-up for assignments that required software inaccessible to students with a used copy of the (exorbitantly expensive) textbook. While I understand that creating a textbook is a time-consuming process (I should know, one of my college courses created a free online textbook as a final project) and the creators deserve to be compensated for their effort, if prices become so steep that only a few students in the class can stretch their budget to accommodate a new copy of the course text, the publisher’s bottom line is still going to hurt. With free options like Coursera and Open University growing by leaps and bounds, publishers need to rethink their business models from the ground up or risk becoming obsolete.

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.