{"id":4738,"date":"2022-04-22T14:24:28","date_gmt":"2022-04-22T18:24:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/?p=4738"},"modified":"2022-04-22T14:24:28","modified_gmt":"2022-04-22T18:24:28","slug":"paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/2022\/04\/22\/paper\/","title":{"rendered":"Paper"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m thinking about paper.<\/span><\/p>

I want to take a step back and just pause for a moment. Our material world is regressing into smaller and smaller and smaller pocket sized configurations. And yes, we can celebrate that. Access to an entire world of possibilities is becoming in reach for more people every day. But when do we consider what\u2019s lost?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Anyhow, paper is condemned to be an antiquated guilty pleasure. It\u2019s tangible. What you hold in your hands used to be a tree that never wanted to be shaven impossibly thin and abused by a person. It\u2019s easy to see how that has a harmful environmental impact. Although, I worry that in our rush to make things \u2018green\u2019 and \u2018paperless\u2019 we\u2019ve pushed our things in that direction to an extreme that it also destroys our world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

I\u2019m admittedly not totally informed on sustainable practices. But it is hard to miss headlines with shocking announcements of swaths of land being traded for cryptocurrency. Rainforests reduced to rubble, fodder for the propagation of non-fungible tokens. How? It\u2019s harder to connect those pieces to digital interfaces. I don\u2019t know how my phone connects to a satellite that connects me to the internet, what even <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> the internet- it\u2019s gobbledy gook.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The digital world is glorious though. Don\u2019t mistake my critique as a denial of that truth. Being handed a phone opens up impossible worlds that a piece of paper can\u2019t. But who will articulate the beauty in something that already is, that can\u2019t be changed, undone, done-over \u2013 That doesn\u2019t truly offer you drafts. Command + Z is incredible. Almost nothing you \u2018touch\u2019 in a digital interface can not be undone and corrected. The physical world is not so generous. You can\u2019t so readily remove your presence from a page. Even erasing requires some feverish back and forth motion, almost like an emotional impulse to fix what you saw as a mistake. And only when a mark was left by a substance that\u2019s attractive to rubber. And then there will always be some impression left behind on the canvas. Most people won\u2019t notice, you might even forget about it after a while, but its surface knows what you did. It remembers. I love that about paper.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

It\u2019s a shame, I think, to demonize this thing that can be so romantic to others. Have we even really tried to preserve paper as a responsible means of creating? I mean <\/span>really<\/span><\/i> tried. We saw a way out, an escape, and a miracle (though with its own faults). The flocking to that intangible, immaterial realm came at paper\u2019s downfall. I miss you, paper \u2013 send a postcard. <\/span><\/p>

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cEvery act of creation begins with an act of destruction\u201d \u2013 Pablo Picasso<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":4739,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-incidentals","entry-card--landscape"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s86O3z-paper","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Paper-01.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4738"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4740,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4738\/revisions\/4740"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}