The Myth of the Paperless Office
Abstract
From the Publisher: Over the past thirty years, many people have proclaimed the imminent arrival of the paperless office. Yet even the World Wide Web, which allows almost any computer to read and display another computer's documents, has only increased the amount of printing done by computer users. The use of e-mail in an organization increases paper consumption by an average of 40 percent. In The Myth of the Paperless Office, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper study paper usage as a way to understand the work that people do and the reasons they do it the way they do. Using the tools of enthnography and cognitive psychology, they look at paper use from the level of the individual up to that of organizational culture. Central to Sellen and Harper's investigation is the concept of -- the activities that an object allows, or affords. The physical properties of paper (its being thin, light, porous, opaque, and flexible) afford the human actions of grasping, carrying, folding, writing, and so on. The concept of affordance allows us to compare the affordances of paper with those of existing digital devices. We can then ask what kinds of devices or systems would make new kinds of activities possible or better support current activities. The authors argue that paper will continue to play an important role in office life. Rather than pursue the ideal of the paperless office, we should work toward a future in which paper and electronic document tools work in concert and organizational processes make optimal use of both.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Computer displays are not yet as portable, flexible, or well-designed as paper.
“computer displays are not yet as portable, flexible, or well-designed as paper. 83”
From Health information technology: fallacies and sober realities (2010) · cites this paper as [83]
Cites
A comparison of reading paper and on-line documents
O'Hara, K. P., & Sellen, A. J. (1997) · doi:10.1145/258549.258787 · Cited by 582 · see citing works
Self-citationMarshall, C. C. (1997) · doi:10.1145/263690.263806 · Cited by 404 · see citing works
Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation
Marshall, C. (1998) · doi:10.1145/276627.276632 · Cited by 315 · see citing works
Paper as an analytic resource for the design of new technologies
Sellen, A. J., & Harper, R. H. R. (1997) · doi:10.1145/258549.258780 · Cited by 158 · see citing works
Self-citationThe reading appliance revolution
Schilit, B. N., Price, M. N., Golovchinsky, G., et al. (1999) · Computer · doi:10.1109/2.738306 · Cited by 91 · see citing works
Student readers' use of library documents
O'Hara, K. P., Smith, F., Newman, W., et al. (1998) · ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) · doi:10.1145/274644.274678 · Cited by 88 · see citing works
The Future of Annotation in a Digital (Paper) World
Marshall, C. (1998) · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · Cited by 57 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension
Mangen, A., Walgermo, B. R., & Brønnick, K. (2013) · International Journal of Educational Research · doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2012.12.002 · Cited by 858 · see citing works
Reading behavior in the digital environment: Changes in reading behavior over the past ten years
Liu, Z. (2005) · Journal of Documentation · doi:10.1108/00220410510632040 · Cited by 664 · see citing works
How bodies matter: five themes for interaction design
Klemmer, S. R., Hartmann, B., & Takayama, L. (2006) · Proceedings of the 6th conference on Designing Interactive systems · doi:10.1145/1142405.1142429 · Cited by 645 · see citing works
Health information technology: fallacies and sober realities
Karsh, B.-T., Weinger, M. B., Abbott, P. A., & Wears, R. L. (2010) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1136/jamia.2010.005637 · Cited by 365 · see citing works
Knowledge Worker Roles and Actions—Results of Two Empirical Studies
Reinhardt, W., Schmidt, B., Sloep, P., & Drachsler, H. (2011) · Knowledge and Process Management · doi:10.1002/kpm.378 · Cited by 267 · see citing works
Constructing CSCW: The First Quarter Century
Schmidt, K., & Bannon, L. (2013) · Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) · doi:10.1007/s10606-013-9193-7 · Cited by 129 · see citing works
Exiting the Cleanroom: On Ecological Validity and Ubiquitous Computing
Carter, S., Mankoff, J., Klemmer, S. R., & Matthews, T. (2008) · Human–Computer Interaction · doi:10.1080/07370020701851086 · Cited by 107 · see citing works
Mobile technologies in mobile spaces: Findings from the context of train travel
Axtell, C., Hislop, D., & Whittaker, S. (2008) · International Journal of Human-Computer Studies · doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.07.001 · Cited by 80 · see citing works
Morrison, C., Jones, M., Blackwell, A., & Vuylsteke, A. (2008) · Critical Care · doi:10.1186/cc7134 · Cited by 71 · see citing works
Soden, R., & Palen, L. (2016) · Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2858036.2858545 · Cited by 59 · see citing works
Waterson, P., Glenn, Y., & Eason, K. (2012) · International Journal of Medical Informatics · doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2011.10.011 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
Building a Birds Eye View: Collaborative Work in Disaster Response
Fischer, J. E., Reeves, S., Rodden, T., Reece, S., Ramchurn, S. D., & Jones, D. (2015) · Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2702123.2702313 · Cited by 28 · see citing works
- Authors
- Sellen, A. J., & Harper, R. H. R.
- Venue
- The MIT Press eBooks
- Publisher
- The MIT Press
- Published
- 2001
- Volume
- 1
- OpenAlex
- W1552242696
- Cited by
- 902
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 22 · 2019: 19 · 2018: 24 · 2017: 31 · 2016: 30 · 2015: 23 · 2014: 51 · 2013: 60 · 2012: 61
- FWCI
- 52.57
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The MIT Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- MIT Press Books (submittedVersion)
- Thammasat University Digital Collections (submittedVersion)
- TU Digital Collections (Thammasat University) (submittedVersion)
- Lancaster EPrints (Lancaster University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Personal Information Management and User Behavior
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Information Systems Theories and Implementation
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Facilities and Workplace Management
- Keywords
- paperless office, paper consumption, affordances, office work, email, printing, organizational culture, electronic documents, work practices
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
