Demos fails to predict unintended consequence shock
by Paul Miller
Right, we've had a complaint. Not exactly a formal one (it was made in the pub last week by someone who might unveil his identity in the comments below), but serious nonetheless.
The complaint is that the Demos Open Access policy may be having an unintended detrimental impact on the world's forests.
You see (so I'm told) whenever researchers at certain other think tanks can't think of what to write, they now mosey on over to the Demos online catalogue and download a few things for inspiration. The thing is they print them out as well.
I have a mental image of the reams of paper being consumed every minute as wonks around the world print out demos publications without using the double sided or 2 pages per side settings.
Action is needed against these unscrupulous trigger happy print button clickers!
Stefan K.
Since computers became more popular, 'over'printing was there from the start. Why should an Open Access think tank be hold responsible for the (nasty) behaviours of mankind.
Punish the thief, not the guys who leave their car open.
Helen Helen
Am I missing something, or do you guys never read anything off the screen? Whatever happened to the vision of the paperless office?
Will Davies
On a vaguely related note I have just come across the following enigma in a paper by Stephen graham:
"Consequently, as the UK think-tank Demos (1997, p. 6) put it, in contemporary network-based societies..."
Am I to assume this is the reference to the page or the author?
Will Davies
A choice piece of anecdata states that introducing email to an office leads paper consumption to rise by 40% (I actually have a reference for this, but facts like that don't need to be true).
So yes, what the man in the pub was getting at sounds correct. In fact, the man in the pub's satchel is currently stuffed with the likes of "Public Toilets and the Future of the World" (Worpole 1996) and "LA: The Skegness of America?" (Leadbeater 1998), and he has legitimate fears as to whether or not these tomes will ever be read.
In a world where linkage/access becomes more significant than content, you go around tagging content but not consuming it. In the blogging world, you link to something to suggest it may be up your street (does anybody ever read *anything* on the Poltical Theory Daily Review - check it out, it's bonkers). In the Open Access think tank world, you print something out to suggest it may be up your street.
It's about creating meta-data: clicking "save as" equals "potentially worth printing"; clicking "print" equals "potentially worth reading". Sadly they haven't yet invented anything you can click for "read".