JOURNEY TO THE PAPERLESS SOCIETY.

Samsung's chromebokk.

Everywhere you look, where paper once thrived it now doesn’t. Cash is increasingly a number on a screen, airlines push online check-ins, people send e-cards, and companies manage hard drives in lieu of filing cabinets. If you open up your eyes you will see E-readers like the Kindle, tablets like the iPad, and other devices are reshaping all corners of the publishing industry. Consumers are fueling a meteoric rise in e-books and other content accessed via digital subscriptions. Meanwhile, eHealth is pushing medical records to computers, vastly cutting out paper waste. 

It won’t stop there. Everyday, we learn about new e-paper technologies that mix the qualities of paper with the interactivity and durability of touchscreens. For traditional paper, this is the final nail in the coffin. Like a stealthy ninja, technology that displaces paper-based communications are now diffusing throughout society, largely unnoticed. One day we’ll look around and ask, “Hey, where did all the paper go?”

Can this realy come to an end?

A paperless society? Really?

This is Africa, print media are struggling, but they should have been dead years ago. Despite the ubiquity of the iPad, the evolution of the smartphone, and the emergence of a $199 tablet designed specifically around buying and consuming digital, rather than paper, content, we're dismally far from being paperless. Newspapers abound, magazines that should long ago have moved online line the shelves at bookstores, and my kids still come home with paper notices from school.

No, we haven't gone paperless yet. And, quite frankly, on the eve of 2012, this is an utterly unacceptable state of affairs.