Reading 3.1. Read the text

Unit 1

6

of information between Breedlove and its clients now goes via e-mail, with forms 

attached as PDF files. The next step is to roll out an online service so that clients 

can log on to manage their accounts. Only the Internal Revenue Service

4

 still in-

sists on paper for some things but even it claims to be going electronic soon.

Fewer trees will die and less ink will be squirted, but that is not her primary 

motivation, she says. It is that everyone — clients and staff — is sick of paper. 

The clients tend to be young, middle-class families with toddlers; they are good 

with technology and already pay bills online, use e-tickets on planes, e-file their 

tax returns and Google recipes rather than using cookbooks. And Breedlove’s 16 

employees are in their 20s, native to Facebook and instant-messaging and baffled 

by the need for paper. Now everybody is happier. Next year the firm expects to be 

completely paperless.

A decade ago this scenario was brought up only in sardonic jokes. Instead of the 

paperless office promised by futurists, offices and homes seemed to be drowning in 

more paper than ever. In the digital era people were exchanging much more infor-

mation, but neither technology nor behaviour had caught up. They were printing 

e-mails for archiving and Word documents for marking up by hand.

But as it turned out, that was the very year when demand for office paper began 

declining. Office workers in rich countries will reduce their consumption of paper 

year for the foreseeable future.

Older people still prefer a hard copy of most things, but younger workers are 

increasingly comfortable reading on screens and storing and retrieving informa-

tion on computers or online.

As new generations of office workers leave university — where their class notes 

and syllabuses are online these days — they take their habits with them. They like 

digital information because it reduces clutter

5

. It can be “tagged” and thus filed into 

many folders instead of just one physical file. It can be searched by keyword. It can be 

cut, pasted and remixed. It allows for easier collaboration, through features such as 

“track changes”. It can be shared across an ocean as easily as across a desk. Increas-

ingly, it resides in the Internet “cloud” and can be accessed from anywhere, not just 

in the office. By contrast, paper tends to get torn, stained, burnt, soaked and lost.

Information thus appears to be becoming paperless roughly as transport 

has become horseless. When cars came along, the number of horses in America 

4

  Internal Revenue Service — Налоговое управление США.

5

  Clutter — беспорядок.

4. Discussion

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dropped at first, but the number is now roughly back to where it was in the late 

19th century. As a share of the trips people take, horses have become insignificant. 

But they are thriving for special occasions and sport. Paper, too, has a future — for 

the fine copy of the “Iliad”, the women’s fashion magazine and the memorable 

certificate. But nobody, least of all the staff at Breedlove, will shed a tear for those 

stacks of tax forms on the carpet.

Adapted from the “Economist”, 9th October 2008

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