Over the past couple of years it's become the recipient of a major dose of lip service: The Paperless Society. Thousands of web pages mention the catch phrase. Some even claim to be doing something significant in the attempt to achieve it (if, that is, it really is a desirable goal). Reviewing all of them would be a pointless task, but an overview of some of the possibilities can still be of interest:

• A flashy, java-intensive, but almost contentless site can be found at the logical domain name of: http://www.thepaperlesssociety.com/
• Another company, Buchanan e-mail claims to have solutions which to this reader seem pretty first-generation internet.
• Accessing the Zero Paper Society  is a slideshow presentation. The slides are scanned transparencies, some of them even lopsided due to being scanned when not fully straight. One would think that when singing the praises of paperlessness, even with a slightly critical outlook, one would make the effort to make being digital worthwhile by actually digitizing the text rather than a picture of it, but expectations are one thing, reality another.
• A wonderful representative of what seems to be the ideological vanguard of paperlessness can be found in a rather incomprehensible treatise that among other things sings the praises of a hypertextual reality without even containing one link. The entire essay can be found at: Polynoise: Information Abstracts for the Information Spectacle, and for the brave at heart it's possible to check out Qazingulaza, the main home site of all of this rambling.

Nationwide, destroying business records is a $245 million industry and is growing at a 15 percent annual clip, said Robert Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Information Destruction in Phoenix.

And without a doubt, Cathy's take on this subject deserves its place in the sun, or at least in cyberspace:
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