Role of paper in disruptions

After being hacked and down for 3 days, the newspaper "Expresso volta a ser feito e desenhado à mão. Como no primeiro dia." by Expresso in LinkedIn.

Role of paper in disruptions

"People check a posted list of survivors at an evacuation center in Miyagi prefecture's Natori city on Monday, March 14." from CNN

We are well aware of the great uses that information technologies and social networks supported by internet connections have been playing in the last years. Yet, we tend to minimize the role played by paper in times of great disruptions, like the one Japan is going through.

Time costs and disconnectedness in PIM systems

Van Kleek, M. G., Bernstein, M., Panovich, K., Vargas, G. G., Karger, D. R., and Schraefel, M. (2009). Note to self: examining personal information keeping in a lightweight note-taking tool. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 1477-1480:

"We also observed that users often do not respect the traditional boundaries of PIM — for example, by mashing contact information into calendar appointments and calling it a to-do. This may be yet another instance of users optimizing for rapid capture: the time cost of interacting with multiple traditional PIM applications is even more substantial than that needed for one. But we believe another issue is in play: that they feel the information is a unit, and do not wish to partition it among multiple disconnected applications, where it will be harder to view and retrieve as a unit. This indicates a significant need for a more flexible data model and user model in PIM systems." (p. 1480)

Another related entry on scrapnotes and «technologizing» everything with links for the Haystack Group and associated projects, like the one referred in the study - List.it.