Enough with simplistic predictions of its demise.
Afamiliar fallacy in philosophy comes to us in the traditional Latin form, post hoc ergo propter hoc—"After this, therefore because of this." Most people intuitively understand the weakness of the inference, even if they’re not logicians.
A trickier notion, lacking a canonical Latin phrase, is: "After this, therefore better than this." Try that one on the folks sleeping outside Apple stores when the newest iPad or iPhone is about to go on sale. Not so intuitive a fallacy to them, or to many others.
Later must be better, right?
The power of logic being its generality, you could explore the after/better issue in any area of human existence. Second husband versus first husband. Marvin Hamlisch versus Mozart. JetBlue versus horse and buggy (a mode of transport rarely canceled because of light mist in the air). Let’s stick here to a matter that absorbs almost everyone who cares about books, journals, newspapers, language, learning.
This veteran of 30 years of newspaper work at The Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere knew at that moment that the broadsheet industry had lost its "paper battle," even if the final surrender would not come for decades. When it still seemed winnable, I often argued that if advertising could make something as stupid and self-destructive as smoking seem cool, then it could make newspapers hip once again—think Bogart in Deadline U.S.A. (1952)—even for the digital generation. But newspapers surrendered the paper battle without a shot, and now they’re fighting for their lives, paywall or no paywall.
And yet there is a counternarrative brought to us, unsurprisingly, by those rectangular wonders called books (no qualifier, please). When Nicholas A. Basbanes’s On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) arrived a couple of months ago, I sensed that a rebuttal that had been building since The Myth of the Paperless Office, by Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper (MIT Press, 2002), had now received its corroborative coda.
Basbanes offers other pro-paper reasons as well. Like Blanchette, he notes that "the impulse to ‘keep a hard copy’ remains central to bureaucratic culture, and is sure to endure despite the arrival of electronic recordkeeping." And his observations about the dangers of the eclipse of paper record keeping at government agencies such as the NSA now read as both ironic and spot on. "With so much material now being ‘born digital’ and stored in computers instead of file cabinets," he writes, "the likelihood of a security breach has increased exponentially." One senior intelligence analyst confides to Basbanes, himself a former naval officer: "Very simply stated, paper is safer."
Since paper exists, he might have said, we don’t have to invent it.
