Scratch paper can still beat a Blackberry in a fair fight

People keep chuckling at me for writing stuff of bits of recycled paper instead of tapping it into a sleek digital device. They can keep chuckling. For the all the breathtaking advances in telecommunications technology, it’s still paper that comes through in the clutch.

The breathless dotcom fever of my post college years was replete with doomsday predictions about future of the notebook and its ilk, auguring a brave new paperless world in which all the information we needed would bounce from portable devices to virtual storage in the cloud. That triumphalism was predictably mugged by reality, as evidenced by the avalanche of senseless internet-driven printing. This ranges from grouchy old codgers who insist their secretaries print out each of their emails to the never-ending scenes of a printer in the back corner of some office churning out hundreds of pages of garbled nonsense within minutes is unceremoniously into a recycling bin.

I’m not surprised paper never disappeared, but I’m still surprised how relevant it remains in doing the jobs that have supposedly been relegated to its evolutionarily superior electronic progeny.

My sleek new Blackberry is a good case in point. I frequently get email on my phone from someone in the US saying please call me, with a US phone number listed at the bottom. With a single click, Blackberry can dial the number – only it doesn’t put on the international codes that I need to dial out of Venezuela. So I try copying and pasting, only for some reason it always pastes the number in twice such that it can’t figure out how to actually connect. So there I am, pulling out one of those embarrassing pieces of flattened wood pulp, copying the number out of the phone so that I can punch it back in again with the right dialing codes. Technology marches forward, albeit with the help of its forebears.

Paper is still my ace in the sleeve when traveling abroad, even if cell phone roaming was supposed to have made it irrelevant. I flew into Guyana last year to cover the elections with the unspoken guarantee that advances in telecommunications would let me check two different email accounts and my Twitter feed while making calls to Caracas, Washington or Georgetown (the Guyanese capital, not the swish DC neighborhood).

I arrived to find the roaming was disabled. So I went to buy a SIM card that would give me a Guyana line. Phone was locked. I panicked. What now? Chill out, dude, said my coworker Girish, my point man for all things technology, over Google chat as I sat in a sweltering internet café. Just go get the phone unlocked, that’s super easy. I sprinted to the local cell phone chop-shop. Five minutes after arriving they told me there was no way on God’s green earth they could put a Guyana line on that phone. I pulled out a notebook made from scratch paper and wrote phone numbers down on the back pages. That analog contacts list worked remarkably well for the two weeks I was there. In the meantime I bought a chintzy phone with a local line. When the main opposition party accused the government of rigging the vote, I had to stop at a newspaper kiosk to buy one of those scratch-and-sniff cards so I’d have enough credit on the phone to call in the headline.

I’d probably be less contemplative about this if I didn’t live under a “technology cloud” of unending snags and glitches that render even the most state of the art devices utterly useless. I’ve got some unseen magnet for malfunctioning roaming signals, mysterious firewalls that keep me off networks, and most prominently, a WiFi curse that clips my connectivity wings.  Accessing WiFi from a laptop has always been so dodgy and unreliable that for the better part of ten years I’ve simply assumed the wireless doesn’t work. While Isa can walk into a coffee shop with her machine and plug right in, my laptop asks me to define WEP keys or enter IP protocols or any number of other technical mumbo jumbo. Keeping technology expectations low helps keep me in a good mood.

 

I’ve developed something of a sentimental attachment to paper, and admit using it even beyond when it makes sense. Ironic, since in my first job out of college, working in the mental health clinic of a homeless shelter in Seattle where I was forever drowning in administrative paperwork, I dreamed of casting away the piles of paper away with a digital overhaul.

Paper is of course horribly contaminating stuff. The dyes, the bleaches, the runoff that contaminates watersheds should by all rights make it an environmental pariah to match the likes of the oil industry. Pulp and paper is the third largest industrial emitter of global warming pollution, rivaling that of the airlines which get considerably greater attention for their CO2 emissions. To that end I’m glad to see paper being substituted for digital devices. What worries me there is the specter of device proliferation that I mention here and the accompanying onslaught of e-waste -- whose milder climate impact belies its poisonous effects on the human beings that end up “recycling” it.

This frenzied technology rush – particularly the iPads cult appeal that has overshadowed the fact that it was originally meant to be an e-book – is a sign that we really should be using less paper. I certainly would if I could somehow make technology work as advertised. But part of my dependence on paper comes precisely because I feel an almost subconscious desire to use up the mountains of it that are always lying around, most of which is generated by the very technology that was supposed to consign it to the dustbin of history.

I’ve found the biggest intellectual confusion surrounding technology is the inability to distinguish between what technology can do and what it does. The confusion comes from forgetting that no matter how smart the machine, there’s always a human being in driver’s seat. And forgetting that technology can’t move human beings toward smarter collective decision-making. We have to do that ourselves, no matter how sophisticated our technology gets.

Looking on the bright side, this one’s easy for me, because human beings can’t even seem to invent my out of a notebook.