{"id":1543,"date":"2004-05-15T22:16:58","date_gmt":"2004-05-16T05:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/8stars.org\/aa\/2004\/05\/15\/the-paperless-office\/"},"modified":"2004-05-15T22:16:58","modified_gmt":"2004-05-16T05:16:58","slug":"the-paperless-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/2004\/05\/15\/the-paperless-office\/","title":{"rendered":"The paperless office"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pileI’m doing a little housecleaning and found this stack of old jobs shoved into an inaccessible shelf in a closet. These are all Japanese source documents, mostly faxes on flimsy thermal paper, with text now faded to pale gray. The stack is 24″ tall.<\/p>\n

I didn’t make a careful survey, but it’s likely that very few of these papers are any newer than 1992; that’s the year I got a fax-modem. Since then, I’ve had a digital copy of almost every job that’s come to me. The paper copy (I always print out my jobs, regardless) is a temporary convenience–it’s not what I think of as the archival version. I kept around these old papers out of some completeness fetish, but really, the odds that I’ll ever want to refer to any of these (or that I could find what I wanted) are vanishingly slim. So away they go.<\/p>\n

In the book In the Age of the Smart Machine<\/i>, Shoshana Zuboff observed that when the back-office operations at an insurance company were first computerized, the operators still preferred to consult paper files: they considered the online information to be ephemeral and suspect, and felt that the information’s “real” form was on paper. Not me.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, I’ve acquired a new client that has a completely paper-based workflow. But so far, I’ve been able to scare of PDFs of most of the documents they send me anyhow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m doing a little housecleaning and found this stack of old jobs shoved into an inaccessible shelf in a closet. These are all Japanese source documents, mostly faxes on flimsy thermal paper, with text now faded to pale gray. The stack is 24″ tall. I didn’t make a careful survey, but it’s likely that very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}