Most offices in the World Trade Center were equipped with the latest computers, storage devices and broadband connections. Yet when volunteer Robert Galinsky showed up to help clear the site on Sept. 12, his crew felt overwhelmed not by electronic debris so much as by paper: "printouts of e-mails, employee review sheets, interoffice memos, training guides." Galinsky, 36, a multimedia artist, recalls that "we dug through tons and tons of it." And there are similar volumes of paper, stored right alongside the latest PCs and servers, in offices around the world.
It turns out that the more widely computers are deployed...