Paperless

Society is at a transition.  The technology is quickly coming available to become paperless.  E-ink, digital signatures, encryption, high capacity storage and many other components are all dropping in price and increasing in capabilities. We are to the point that the hurdles to going paperless are more cultural than technical.

This represents a significant shift from the previous situation.  In the past, there were technical hurdles toward adopting paperless technology.  More recently the technology was too expensive to be widely used. This isn’t the case any more.  In fact, much of the necessary technology is already in place–even if it isn’t being used very effectively.

The cultural shift to a paperless society is going to be difficult.  People are much more dependent upon paper than they realize as evidenced by the emotional turmoil  most people go through in trying to move their personal paper repositories to a digital environment. It may turn out that a new generation is required to really accept the mental concepts of being paperless. A generation that grew up with digital technology is much more likely to have very few cultural barriers to avoiding paper entirely.  The generation that stops buying prints of their senior pictures will probably be the generation that ushers us into a true paperless world.