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Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office? For office innova

游客2023-12-10  58
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] The word "hubris" (Line Para. 1) most probably means______.
选项 A、arrogance
B、disadvantage
C、imperfectness
D、triumph
答案 A
解析 本题考查根据上下文推测词义。文章开篇指出，对办公革新者来说，“无纸化”办公这一未能实现的梦想是高科技……的一个经典范例。从句意上看，要理解hubris一词的含义，就要弄清楚“无纸化”办公未能实现与技术之间的关系。但是，紧接着的下文开始介绍美国纸张销售的趋势。直到第四段提到数字技术的发展与“无纸化”相抵触：技术越发达，需求的纸反而越多。最后一段追述了“无纸化”一词的来历。该段末提到20世纪八九十年代“无纸化”一词表明，技术承诺将永久改变人们做生意的方式。但这种过分热情却忽视了“无纸办公”远未达到切实可行。由此可见，“无纸办公”过去曾被认为是技术发展的必然结果，但现实情况却是它根本无法实现，因此可以说是“对技术的一种过分的信心”，[A]项含义最接近，是正确项。
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