According to Wired, we No Longer need Hard Copies of Anything

I just read an article over at Wired called Five Useless Gadgets You Should Throw in the Trash Right Now. Provocative right? The author, Charlie Sorrel, then goes on to say how Printers, Scanners, Build-in Optical Drives, Fax Machines, and Landlines are useless. While I can agree with most of these, he makes an absolutely horrible argument for each. In the order he presents them:

Printers

Here is my comment from LifeHacker, which is how I found the article.

I feel like this was just written for shock value. I’ll admit I can get by without Scanner, Fax (I have an EFax number), and Landline (which I’ve been saying will no longer be used when my generation starts buying homes), and even optical drives *in my computer*. But printer? Sure, I don’t need to print out things for school, or have paper backups for invoices I send out and receipts I get. Plus, reading on paper is much easier on the eyes than reading from a computer screen. Mine came with my computer and if you don’t use it that much, as the author claims, you won’t be paying all those extra expenses all that often, will you?

Scanners

I can actually agree scanners aren’t needed for the normal user. However, these are his two arguments: for photos you can get a CD done along with your prints (remember that) and the average camera phone can take a clear enough picture to read the text. Because even if that were true, it’s a less painful process to take enough quality pictures with a phone than scanning an article, right? Most things don’t need to be scanned, in essence, because they are already web-based. That’s all he needed to say.

Built-In Optical Drives

He does qualify this by saying they are still used to get info onto the computer. But they very fact that he suggests the reason to get rid of your scanner is because you can get a CD of your prints and then telling you to ditch the CD drive is stupid. I’ll admit I don’t use mine very often, but it’s in the argument. And until USB drives get cheap enough to replace install CDs, we won’t see people ditching optical drives.

Fax Machines

Agreed. I have an E-Fax number that allows faxes to be sent to my email address. But good ol’ Charlie bursts out this little number: An email is as trackable as a fax, and harder to fake. News Flash: It’s very easy to spoof an email address, and not just because I am a programmer. And besides, what if you only have a hard copy. Well you can use the scanner you ditched. Or take it to Walmart and get it scanned, then put on a CD. Oh, but we ditched our CD drive too.

Sorrel assumes that everything is already computer based when writing the article. While for a lot of people, especially tech-savvy, that might be true- it’s not nearly true for everyone. Especially people like my parents, or even my cousins, who are just 10 years older than me. By getting rid of these first four items, he is essentially saying there is never no way to obtain a digital copy of something, and that is simply not true.

Landlines

I’ve been saying for a while that my generation will likely not get a landline when they buy a house. You’re already seeing it on college campuses. But his argument is preposterous and an utterly stupid claim. There’s one big reason that people keep a landline at home: 911 calls. Has he done the leg work for that? Here is my argument: We have cell phones. BUT: Why do people still have them? Maybe they don’t need a cell phone. Or they’ve had a landline all their life. For Sorrel to use such a stupid example as his argument to say no one needs them is ridiculous.

Wired should have really checked this article before publishing it. I haven’t read Sorrel’s other stuff, but he makes some awful assertions and even worse arguments in this article. Though if he wrote it solely to get attention, I guess it worked.