For hundreds of years, paper was the gold standard of written communication.

Anything you needed Hong Kong WhatsApp Number List to record or remember, from love letters to receipts, was printed on paper.

Then digital communication took hold, and we began to believe the age of paper was over.

Why would anyone continue to use paper, when digital is so much more flexible?

Digital information is easier to share, easier to store. Copiers, filing cabinets, and fax machines disappeared into the digital vortex.

But yet, paper persists. And not just because insurance companies and banks are slow to move off legacy systems.

Paper persists because it’s easier to print a receipt than get a customer to enter their email address. Paper persists because an emailed love letter doesn’t have the same meaning.

Paper persists because, even in Hong Kong WhatsApp Number List a digital world, paper is still useful.

Especially for content marketers, paper has an irreplaceable power we can’t ignore.

The power of context

A few years ago, I discovered something strange about the way I used my digital devices.

When I picked up my phone, my fingers tapped their way to Instagram, or to Mail, without me even thinking about it. When I opened up my laptop, my mouse gravitated to open Mail, Slack, or Chrome.

It was as if I was interacting with my devices on autopilot.

And worse, as I started paying more attention to it, I realized this autopilot was actively subverting my intentions. I’d end up on Reddit when I meant to check the weather, Instagram when I meant to Google something.

To break this habit, I started scrambling my icons.

And it worked: With my icons rearranged, I had to think about what I was doing, instead of auto-navigating to familiar apps.

This was my introduction to the power of digital context.

I’ve always felt connected to the power of context in the physical world. Certain lighting helps me feel ready for bed, and wearing shoes helps put me in the mindset to work.

But, during this little app-experiment, I realized that the digital world had contextual power, too. And until then, I had been ignoring it.

This discovery of digital context changed the way I interacted with my devices. I began to search for ways to put digital in its place, to make space for myself to exist outside of it, on my own.

Unlike digital, writing in paper notebooks and reading paper books allowed me to control the context and leave the space I needed to think and create.

And through it all, I found myself wondering why I hadn’t seen this sooner.

In pursuit of transcendence

If I were to boil down the purpose of all technological development to one goal, it would be this:

Technology helps us transcend the physical world.

Stone tools allowed us to extend our capacity to hunt, shelters kept us safe from the elements, vehicles and telephones helped us conquer space and time, medicine conquers disease …

Technology is about transcendence, and as a species, we’re obsessed with it.

So, it’s no wonder digital entirely captivated us; it is the most transcendent technology we’ve encountered yet.

The internet connects the world in “real time,” entire libraries live in the cloud, and computers can (sort of) drive cars, answer support questions, and predict human behavior.

Never in human history have we been so untethered by the bounds of physical reality.

As we began to realize digital’s potential, we started pouring everything into it — our work, our social circles, our entertainment.

Digital technology seemed like the answer to our transcendent dreams. We could finally leave the physical world behind.