Paper (Draft)
note: this is a failed first draft of a speech i have to give to my class tomorrow. nothing is cleaned up and it is generally horrendous
Think of a piece of paper. A simple, blank, flat, thin sheet of paper. A piece that contains limitless possibilities â paper that can be written on, drawn on, folded, crumpled up, among many other things. Yet today, this piece of paper, this tree derivative - that we, as humans, have used for thousands of yearsâformerly ubiquitous to us as paper currency, mail, or newspapersâhas now become little more than an inconvenience or a backup; companies like Apple Pay and Google dominate the currency and messaging market respectively, and why would you ever use paper? Clunky, easily lost, prone to destruction, not easily transferable, and small â paper is only finite, after all â paper in its various forms seems to be the outdated medium of living.
Yet despite the benefits of digital technology, anything digital can be easily rendered useless. Dropped your phone? Have fun dealing with a potential broken and glitchy screen. Misplaced your car keys? Good luck getting your car to recognize you. Forgot to charge your whatever? Good luck using your computer/Airpods/graphing calculator. And God Forbid you have a software update â thatâs 2 minutes of your time wasted just because some Microsoft or Apple couldnât do a good enough job patching the holes in their code.
So here we are, confronted by a shift in our world, between reliable paper products and uhh⌠slightly less reliable digital technologies. And although this shift to digital stuff is probably pre-determined and destined to happen one day, for now, I still believe that there is hope for paper products â even in a time period which historians currently designate as âThe Digital Ageâ (The Information Age).
So letâs talk about the humble piece of paper. Whatâs so good about it? Well first, itâs simple. And with simplicity comes flexibility. For me, the benefit has mainly resided with math. As I went through harder and harder classes, more symbols, like a long crowbar (an integral), or a sideways M (summation symbol) just couldnât be expressed in any digital medium quickly. Now sure, I couldâve just used a tablet or something like that instead to take my notes, but that brings me to my second point:
Paper is disposable.
Sure, computer people talk a lot about whether when you delete a file if the information â all the bits and bytes and things you typed â really went away, but thatâs not the point. With a piece of paper, like scratch paper, or binder paper, paper is easily disposable. Want secure communication? Screw secure end-to-end encryption, just give your friend a piece of paper. When theyâre done, theyâll just throw it away. This simple, effective form of communication beats all others â provided that you can access your target, and that theyâre literally an armâs length away.
And lastly, although this sounds counterintuitive, paper is unique now. As I alluded to, unfortunately, cash is not king anymore. Credit cards and other forms of digital payment are basically the norm â thereâs almost no place that doesnât accept credit, while there are plenty of places that donât accept cash.
But with that cash comes something different. Thereâs freedom with cash â youâre unconstrained by credit, by worrying if you have enough money for a purchase or if your card will decline â the $20 is right there.
Something similar happens with mail and cards. For the majority of situations, email is the preferred way of communication â itâs formal (supposedly), fast, and convenient. Yet an email isnât human â itâs just the administrative way of communication. Email doesnât capture emotion the same way that a handwritten note, letter, or card does. And sure. We text with emoticons, things like :), đ, âĽď¸, đ or đâ but those only function as a substitute for our faces. And the letters and symbols we send â those donât capture the messiness, the emotion, or the style we put into that message.
< end with something at least urging them to print out and read from paper instead of a computer >