> To use like we'd use paper.
How we use paper derives not only from our own practical needs, but also from the intrinsic limitations of paper. Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size. The idiosyncratic way that tablets were used in Star Trek isn't how people would actually do things, it merely reflects the limitations of the writers to imagine all of the practical implications of technology such as they were depicting. It would be like somebody in the 1800s speculating about motor vehicles, supposing that teams of a dozen or more motor vehicles might be connected using ropes and used to tow a single carriage, because that's how they did it with horses.
> To use like we'd use horses.
> Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size.
Right. And trying to replace a stack of paper with one paper sheet-sized screen is a significant downgrade. Which is why tablets are used primarily for entertainment, not for work.
Having lots of sheets of paper you can spread out around you is an advantage, not a limitation, of the paper-based workflow.
No, a single screen is a massive upgrade over using stacks of paper.
People vastly prefer digital dictionaries over paper dictionaries because you can more quickly find stuff. And that’s with dictionaries in alphabetical order.
Stacks of paper suck, there’s some potential utility in a space ship for all the redundancy around independent tablets you can hand someone. That’s something that regularly happens on the show and kind of makes sense, but is more a visual reference for the audience. Which is where stacks of tablets shine, the viewer can easily follow what their doing even if you can’t see the screen.
It can be true that stacks of paper are better than a single screen in some ways and worse in others. Other people like to be able to spread out multiple sheets of paper in front of them, even if you do not. You are correct that digital search is a huge plus of having a digital interface.
If we’re talking 3-5 pieces of one sided paper for say homework you can spread them out nicely, but scale that to multiple stacks of loose paper and it invariably becomes a mess.
Thus, in practice almost everyone is using multiple screens at work when they can even if printing stuff is trivial.