Thought of the Day - The Allure of Paper

Why do some people (myself included) prefer to work on/with paper for some tasks?

I don't know what it is but i can't brainstorm in a computer program - or mindmap for that matter - i need to do it on paper and then translate it. I don't understand why, i mean my handwriting is shocking and the information then needs to be typed into a computer which means more work but yet i can't bring myself to work exclusivley electronically. Yet i find it easy to work through all the stages of a report electronically, from note-taking to drafts to final copies and wouldn't dream of hand writing at any stage.

There are numerous peices of software trying to bridge the paper-computer gap; OneNote, Visio, mind-mapping etc etc but somehow none of them quite live up to the real thing. Even adding in a tablet and a stylus it still isn't quite right; Is it the pixelated nature of the lines? Is it the lack of tactility? Who knows.

Maybe i am just showing my age, i was brought up with both paper and computers and i might be stuck with that legacy. Maybe the current generation in school won't have these hang-ups, they have always had computers and were probably writing, creating art and music exclusively on computers from an early age. At some point that generation will probably laugh at me for putting things on paper and then inputting them into a computer, in the same way i laugh at people who take paper copies of computer files 'just in case'. Will paper become a socially unacceptable anachronism that only old people use, or maybe it will become a underground culture of people who prefer the real world over the electronic.

Most importantly what will the next media be? In the same way it would have been hard to predict the switch from cave walls to paper, from handwritten to printed and printed to electronic can we really predict what the next media will be? Holograms? Neural interfaces ? Or something completely different?