Rhetorical brilliance - September 12th, 2005 [ « ] [ » ]

You know how everybody’s always going on about about paperless offices and stuff and all these people with their digital paper replacements, tablet PCs, palm pilots and this really cool foldable persistant state screen* blah blah blah, well some colleagues and I were discussing whether we would ever replace paper having seen a flurry of stories on the subject in the last few weeks. This web log post kind of sums up the reasons why people think it’s a good idea to replace paper with other stuff and links to an article that reminds me why I hate Wired magazine (I also dislike Nicholas Negroponte for similar reasons, though I’m sure he’s a lovely man in real life).

Anyway I think I won the argument for the ultimate superiority of pen and paper by drawing a moustache on a photo of Shane Warne scrunching it up into a ball and and throwing it at the head of one of my fellow iterlocutors, from where it bounced entertainingly and harmlessly into his lunchbox. When you produce a paper alternative that allows you to childishly deface photographs before hurling them amusingly at peoples faces without risk of causing anykind of damage (except for massive argument winning deathblows, natch) then you’ll be able to replace paper, until that point I’m not sure there’s much value you can add. Basically, that kind of disposability and flexibility is what paper is all about (IMO etc) and any attempt to reproduce it isn’t going to be up to the original unless it’s made out of paper.

Also you can make these cute little Advance Wars units out of paper. I think that invalidates your warranty if you do it with a Palm Pilot.**

Also on a sort of related note someone has been drawing purile pictures of naked people on random pages in my bosses bosses note book, apparently this has lead to a number of embarasing moments in meetings with senior management.

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*Seriously, this was cool, but not as a replacement for paper, wish i could find the link; anyway they use this technology.

**If you don’t know what Advance Wars is you have 3 options

1. Buy it for your Gameboy Advance as it’s awesome and you won’t regret it.
2. Play it online here thanks to some clever people (not tried this myself)
3. Use the paper to make some rare animals instead.