Speaking of recycling, Scott Weaver surveys the state of C’ville paper use and recycling in the current C-Ville Weekly. Despite being in the thick of the electronic age, the amount of paper being used continues to climb. Though, interestingly, the amount of newspaper being processed by the RSWA is actually dropping.
I chalk it up to old folks (as does Weaver). I bought a laser printer a year and a half ago and I haven’t even burned through the demo cartridge that came with it. It’s been out of paper for two months, but I haven’t bothered to buy paper.
Good story, and it’s interesting that this is posted right above the gravity lounge spam story. My office probably throws away about 5-6 pieces of spam from the fax machine every day, much of it advertising cheap trips to Florida and poorly disguised to try to give you the impression it comes from the “company travel department.” Not to mention the massive amounts of unsolicited mail that comes in every day and goes straight in the recycling bins. That’s where much of our office paper output comes from. But printing isn’t just a generational thing. I’m in my 20s but still usually print multi-page documents; it is difficult to read things on screen.
Oops. Not gravity lounge, x lounge. Sorry. I was just reading somewhere else about a gravity lounge concert.
We old people don’t want the paper. We can’t see the small print. And it gets smaller and smaller. I still have one and a half reams of paper from the three I bought back in 1997. As with Meg, it goes from mailbox to recycle bin, often unopened. I’ve noticed that there are fewer recycling bins on the street every week. Like ours, the first ones issued have worn out and I suspect many people have not requested new ones. I am not recommending this, but, if they went around knocking on doors to see if people wanted them, they would probably get more people recycling again. Of course I’m talking about the curbside recycling program in the city.
I heard John Taylor Gatto speak in Charlottesville 10 years ago. He was a New York City School teacher. He spoke about his lack of technology in his classrooms, and said people’s reading comprehension was better with the printed word over other media.
I found this article from 2000:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E5DB1F3CF933A2575BC0A9669C8B63
Reading on a screen is a new technology evolutionarily speaking, and evolution takes time.
I read a book called The Alphabet Effect about twenty years ago which spent a chapter or two examining the brain conflict going on when trying to read on a computer screen. I have to print it out if I want to absorb it.