We are living in a world that is becoming increasingly virtual. As computers house more and more of our information of and about our lives, we feel ourselves becoming virtually–no pun intended–fish out of water, that is, physical beings stuck in a virtual world.
Without any further ado, let me introduce an article:
Taming the Paper Tiger
Granted, this article was much more concrete than my commentary. It actually spoke to printing documents and reports, and software that addressed the issues behind the glut of printing in the corporate world, elicited by the easy accessibility of information provided by computers. But for a moment, consider the thrust of the article on a far more conceptual level.
For those of you who have bought into the digital camera game, when is the last time you actually printed all your photos from your vacation and placed them in your physical photo album? Or, rather, did you create a photo album available electronically either locally on your machine or over the web? I know I haven’t printed many photos, despite having a nice photo printer and spare ink sitting on the shelf. Not that I never print a picture, but I find myself using electronic photo albums much more frequently. Nevertheless, my wife and I were looking for a couple good photos awhile ago (ironically, to scan into the computer), and even thought it was just for a few minutes, I thoroughly enjoyed looking through our physical photo albums.
And let’s consider the topic of document printing for a moment. In the article, the author said, “It used to be that we would print and distribute; now we distribute and print. Instead of making 50 copies to send around, we send one e-mail and everyone prints it out individually.” I got quite a kick out of this. There is a lot of truth behind this statement. As I write this, I’m referring to the printed magazine version of the article, even though I provide you the electronic link to the same article, because it’s much more relaxing to read on real paper. And these facts apply more so in the corporate world, where email may contain information that we need to study and reference, unlike a lot of personal email that we may just read and file (or delete).
Don’t get me wrong. I think that digital music, photos and documents are a great idea. But it certainly is noticeable that as physical beings, this increasing amount of virtual content imposes a certain amount of discomfort on our non-virtual selves. Until our bodies become completely virtual, that predicament will always exist. And unless you’re changing your name to Neo, I don’t think that will be happening anytime soon.
