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Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office? For office innova

游客2024-12-15  36
问题                 Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office?
    For office innovators, the unrealized dream of the "paperless" office is a classic example of high-tech hubris. Today’s office is drowning in more paper than ever before. But after decades of publicity, American offices may finally be losing their paper obsession. The demand for paper used to exceed the growth of the US economy, but the past two or three year have seen a marked slowdown in sales. Analysts attribute the decline to a variety of causes. Escaping our craving for paper, however, will be anything but a cold-turkey affair. There are some functions that paper serves where a screen display doesn’t work.
    In the early to mid 90s, a booming economy and improved desktop printers helped boost paper sales by 6 to 7 percent each year. But now, plain white office paper will see less than a 4 percent growth rate, despite the strong overall economy. A primary reason for the changes is that for the first time ever, some 47 percent of the workforce entered the job market after computers had already been introduced to offices. In addition, analysts point to the lifeless employment market for white-collar workers—the primary driver of office paper consumption—for the shift in paper usage.
    The changing attitudes toward paper have finally caught the attention of paper companies, says Richard Harper, a researcher at Microsoft and coauthor of the book, The Myth of the Paperless Office (2002). "All of a sudden, the paper industry has started thinking,’ We need to learn more about the behavioral aspects of paper use,’" he says. To reduce paper use, some companies are working to combine digital and paper capabilities. For example, Xerox Corp. is developing electronic paper: thin digital displays that respond to a stylus, like a pen on paper. Notations can be easily erased or saved digitally.
    Even with such technological advances, the improved capabilities of digital storage continues to act against " paperlessness", argues Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif. In his prophetic and metaphorical 1989 essay, "The Electronic Pinata, " he wrote" , The information industry today is like a huge electronic pinata, composed of a thin paper crust surrounding an electronic core." The growing paper crust "is most noticeable, but the hidden electronic core that produces the crust is far larger—and growing more rapidly. The result is that we are becoming paperless, but we hardly notice at all." "That’s one of the great ironies of the information age," Saffo says. " It’s just common sense that the more you talk to someone by phone or computer, it inevitably leads to a face-to-face meeting."
    As buzzwords go, " paperless" has been known for a long time with little or no results.
    The term "paperless clearing houses" was probably first coined in a 1966 article in the Harvard Business Review in reference to the emergence of digital data storage. But " paperlessness" did not enter the public’s imagination until 1975, when a Business Week article entitled " The Office of the Future" predicted that by 1990"most record-handling will be electronic." Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the term "paperless" came to embody technology’s promise to permanently change the way people do business. The enthusiasm sometimes took on a life of its own, with the trendiest companies demanding " paperlessness" long before it was practical. [br] Because of______, the public get to know the term "paperless".
选项 A、The Myth of the Paperless Office
B、The Electronic Pinata
C、Harvard Business Review
D、The office of the Future
答案 D
解析 本题考查事实细节。选项中的四本书分别出现在文中第三、四和五段。《无纸化办公的神话》在第三段只是作为理查德·哈珀的著作被提及，该书的内容文中没有涉及。第四段介绍《电子彩罐》的内容是关于信息产业与纸的消费之间的关系，没有提到“无纸化”这个概念。第五段提到《哈佛商业评论》上的一篇文章最先炮制了“无纸化票据交换所”一词，但它用来指称数字化数据存储的出现，与“无纸化”概念不同。该段第三句提到．直到1 975年“无纸化”一词才进入公众想象之中，当时《商业周刊》发表了一篇题为《未来办公室》的文章，由此可知[D]为正确项。
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