THE SOCIAL LIFE OF PAPER

by MALCOLM GLADWELL
Looking for method in the mess.
Issue of 2002-03-25
Posted 2002-03-18
On a busy day, a typical air-traffic controller might be in charge of as many as twenty-five airplanes at a time—some ascending, some descending, each at a different altitude and travelling at a different speed. He peers at a large, monochromatic radar console, tracking the movement of tiny tagged blips moving slowly across the screen. He talks to the sector where a plane is headed, and talks to the pilots passing through his sector, and talks to the other controllers about any new traffic on the horizon. And, as a controller juggles all those planes overhead, he scribbles notes on little pieces of paper, moving them around on his desk as he does. Air-traffic control depends on computers and radar. It also depends, heavily, on paper and ink.

When people talk about the need to modernize the American air-traffic-control system, this is, in large part, what they are referring to. Whenever a plane takes off, the basic data about the flight—the type of plane, the radar I.D. number, the requested altitude, the destination—are printed out on a stiff piece of paper, perhaps one and a half by six and a half inches, known as a flight strip. And as the plane passes through each sector of the airspace the controller jots down, using a kind of shorthand, everything new that is happening to the plane—its speed, say, and where it's heading, clearances from ground control, holding instructions, comments on the pilot. It's a method that dates back to the days before radar, and it drives critics of the air-traffic-control system crazy. Why, in this day and age, are planes being handled like breakfast orders in a roadside diner?

This is one of the great puzzles of the modern workplace. Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn't happened. Every country in the Western world uses more paper today, on a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago. The consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper, for instance—the most common kind of office paper—rose almost fifteen per cent in the United States between 1995 and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered by computerization. A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts, however, don't agree. Paper has persisted, they argue, for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers. The dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk—or the spectacle of air-traffic controllers tracking flights through notes scribbled on paper strips—arises from a fundamental confusion about the role that paper plays in our lives.
. . . go on. It's good.