As it is used.in line 79, the word it most nearly refers to: the phenomenon of life. Ar-S9 31 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. Passage11 Paper enabIes a certain kind of think.ing. What covers many desks are piles of paper-joui-nals, maga- zines, blnders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other 60 artifacts of the know16dge ecorAomy. When a group at a leading computer company studied pilinLY behavior sev- eral years ago, they found thal even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler. Over time, piles get bioken down and resorted, sometimes chrono- 65 logically and. thematically- clues about certain docu- ments tnay be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking a certsin piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the gtack. SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "The Social Life of Paperf by Malcolm Gladwell102002 by The Conde Nast Publications). Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn't happened. Every country in the Western world uses inore paper todav. on a per-capita basis, than it did ten ye'ars ago. The consumption of 5 uncoated free-sheet paper, for instance-the most common kind of ofFIce paper-rose almost fifteen per cent in the Unitcd Stat¢8 bètween 1995 and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of bow hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly 10 resistant we are lo the efficiencies offered by computer- ization. A Dumber of cognitive psychologists and ergonoLnic experts, however, don't agiee. Paper has persisted, they ar(Fue, for veTy good reasons: when it comes to performing ceTtain kinds of cognitive tasks, 15 paper has anY advalltages over computers. But why do we pile documents instead of filing 70 them? Because piles represent the process of active. ongoing thinkintr. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, aigues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktop to hold 'ide&s which they cannot yet categoiize 75 or even decide how they miiyht use.. The messy desk is not necessarily a sion of disorganization. It may be a sign of COEllplexity: those who deal with Jnany unTe- solved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the p&pcrs on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted 80 and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks 2s contextual cues lo "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been inter- 85 rupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains. The case for paper is made most eloquently in The M)?th of the Paperless Office, by two social scientists, Abigail Sellen and Ricbard Harper. They begin their book with an account of a study they conducted at the 20 International Monetary Fund, in Washington, D.C. Econotnists at the IMF spend tnost of their time writin reports on complicated economic qtLestions, work that would seem to be perfectly suited to sitting in front of a computer. Nonetheless, the IMF is awash in paper, and 25 Sellen and Hai"per wanted to find out why. Their answer is that the business of writino reports-at least at the IMF-is an intensely collaboratike process, involvincT the professional judutnents and contributions of many people. The economists bling drafts of reports to con- 30 ference roorns, spread out tbe relevant pages, and nego- tiate changes with one another. They go back to their offices and jot down COmKnenÈs in the margin, taking advantage of the freedom offeied by the informality of the handwritten note. Then they deIiver the annotated 35 draft to the author in person, taking him or her, page by page, through the suggested changes. At the end of the process, Ihe author spreads out all the pages wilh cotn- ents on a desk and starts to enter them on the com- pllter-moving the pages around, organizing and 40 reorganizing, saving and discarding.
