What Hath XEROX Wrought?

By Donald M. Morrison

Imagine for a moment that some inventive and omnipotent god offered the nation a device that would greatly advance the spread of information. In return, the deity required that the President resign, that stacks of sensitive Government and corporate secrets be made public, and that the country be buried in a sea of paper. There would probably be few takers.

Yet that bargain is in effect the unintended heritage of the Xerox machine. Since its perfection less than two decades ago, the green-eyed deus ex machina has helped alter the course of history and changed forever the daily rhythms of white-collar life. The photocopier has, its detractors say, fostered waste, encouraged sloth, stifled creativity and punched holes in the copyright laws. Bureaucrats complain that the machine now makes confidential exchanges all but impossible; foes of official secrecy complain that fear of Xerox-abetted leaks has made bureaucrats more secretive than ever. Whatever the complaint, in view of the social, economic and moral consequences of the office copying machine, the time has plainly come to ask: What hath Xerox wrought?

Xerox, it must be noted at the outset, is a trademark of the Xerox Corp. of Stamford, Conn. The word comes from the Greek xeros, meaning "dry." It refers to the dry, electrostatic copying process (a quantum improvement over earlier wet photographic methods) finally developed in 1938 in a one-room laboratory behind a beauty parlor in Astoria, Queens, by a penurious patent attorney named Chester F. Carlson. Xerox Corp. had revenues of $4.05 billion last year, and today accounts for more than half of all photocopier sales and leases in the U.S. (The chief producers of copying machines after Xerox are IBM and 3M.)

The same numerical strength that has made Xerox a household word has also fed an epidemic of Xeromania. There are 2.3 million copying machines in the U.S., and last year they emitted an estimated 78 billion copies--enough to paper Long Island from shore to shore and, if laid end to end, to girdle the globe 546 times at its widest point. Those numbers are double the figures of five years ago, and are expected to more than double again in five years. Hardly any school or library is without at least one machine, and the Xerox seems to have replaced the water cooler as an office social center. The isolated Havasupai Indians on the floor of the Grand Canyon turn out their tribal newsletter on two Xerox 660s. Gosplan, the state planning committee of the U.S.S.R., reproduces many of its official documents on Xerox machines. As a result of the galloping ubiquity of office copiers, hardly anyone nowadays passes up an opportunity to use one. "It's a machine that generates its own demand, like cocktail nuts," says Boston University Sociologist Mark G. Field. "It is used because it is available."

The Xerox machine has eased its way into the fabric of workaday America so subtly that only on occasion do people realize how important it has become. The U.S. Postal Service got away with raising postal rates at the end of the year after only a moderate amount of protest; but when the agency simultaneously shut down 2,400 coin-operated copiers in post offices (after complaints from private copy-service interests), public outrage was strong enough to have most of the machines restored. Much of the evidence that toppled Richard Nixon and his Watergate conspirators came from photocopied documents leaked to the press or uncovered by Government investigators. Many recent disclosures about CIA and FBI abuses have been based on Xeroxed leaks and, though he will not say, CBS Correspondent Daniel Schorr probably received his leaked copy of the House Intelligence Committee report last month hot off some Washington copying machine (see THE PRESS).

Right now the machine is at the center of a furious battle over copyright laws. Librarians and educators insist that they should be allowed to photocopy just about anything; authors and publishers are upset that their works are being pirated. The problem is particularly acute for publishers of easily cribbed material such as sheet music, journal-article reprints that are required reading in college lecture courses, and expensive economic newsletters. Plan's Oilgram

News Service for instance, a petroleum industry newsletter that costs $435 a year, is available for pennies a copy to anyone with a Xerox machine and a borrowed original. After years of controversy, the Senate last week passed a revision of the copyright law that would prohibit photocopying of more than a small excerpt from copyrighted material. The bill is now bogged down in the House. Says Marshall McLuhan: "Whereas Caxton and Gutenberg enabled all men to become readers, Xerox has enabled all men to become publishers."

McLuhan notwithstanding, mankind has recognized the value of making copies at least since the day that Moses had to go back up the mountain for a second set of tablets to replace the ones he had broken. Medieval monks gladly spent lifetimes copying manuscripts by hand. Photography, that most exact of reproductive processes, has since its invention in the last century been elevated to a high art. But unlike most illuminated manuscripts and some photographs, Xerox copies are seldom more interesting than their originals. The Xerox machine has taken the art out of copying, made it too easy. As a result, people are copying more now and enjoying it less. Nothing nowadays seems too trivial to be immortalized by that moving light-bar, memos of momentary importance, yesterday's newspaper clippings, smutty jokes for the office bulletin board, chain letters, recipes, offspring's homework. Some employers have even begun to allow their workers access to company copiers for personal use, a cheap, morale-building perquisite.

The urge to reproduce is producing some alarming results. A new impersonality has crept into human discourse, as Xeroxk copies are used more and more in place of personal communication --letters, party invitations (with the now obligatory road map), even Christmas cards. Americans seem to be losing the faculties of compression, digestion and economy in their written communication. After all, why bother to summarize when you can simply attach a photocopy of the original?

Copiers are churning out boxcars of raw, unsummarized information, but is anybody out there reading it? In a study, one Boston company wrote, "Did you really read this?" on all Xerox copies produced at the firm, and requested that they be returned with an answer. More than half came back marked "no." Even the people who make copies no longer find it necessary always to read them first. Watergate Defendant Kenneth Parkinson successfully argued that he had hot read a particular incriminating document; he had merely Xeroxed it. The photocopier has made many Americans too lazy to copy documents by hand, to use carbon paper, to express something in their own words, to read --perhaps too lazy to think.

Even the Xerox machine's contributions to investigative journalism are ambiguous. The copier may have helped disgruntled leakers illuminate a few dark Government and corporate secrets, but it has also spurred bureaucrats to even greater taciturnity. After all, what malefactor in his right mind would put anything incriminating--or even refreshingly outspoken--on paper nowadays? In addition, the copier's ability to turn confidential communications into bestsellers has encouraged memo drafters everywhere to strive for blandness. Says Professor Anthony Athos of the Harvard Business School: "When the writer knows that through the magic of Xerox many people will see what he has written, then it loses the sharp cutting edge and gains what I call administrative opacity. What we have is a proliferation of blah, blah, blah."

Xerox machines have probably become too ubiquitous for Americans to kick the habit entirely, but there are some measures that could discourage excess. Copier manufacturers could end their current race to build ever faster and more convenient machines, which only encourage overuse. Heavy institutional users of copiers could also replace their hares with tortoises; slower machines are generally cheaper to operate any way. To conserve paper -- and trees -- manufacturers could provide more recycled paper for their machines. And, of course, a little personal self-control would help; copying a marginally impor tant document does not diminish its superfluity one bit. And who really enjoys receiving Xeroxed Christmas greetings?

The copier may have its faults, but the machine is, after all, a relatively recent invention. Once some of the novelty wears off, Xerox users will probably learn to be a little more dis criminating about what they copy. And despite the machine's debilitating effects on letter-writing, the great god Xeros has kept his part of the bargain: the copy ing machine does make it easier for in formation to be spread. Certainly any thing that greases the path of knowledge is a net gain for society. Besides, with more than 2 million machines in use, it is a little late to stop the revolution. Says Chandler B. Grannis, editor-at-large of Publisher's Weekly: "Copying machines exist. They will be used, legally and ethically or not."

Indeed, they will be used more and more. Sales and leases of office copiers have been advancing at a rate of 15% a year, and a number of manufacturers now offer personal copiers with price tags as low as $99. The day may not be far off when nearly everyone who has a typewriter will also own a photocopier.

If so, then the need for discretion, self-control and clear prose will be greater than ever. And if the beast can be tamed, the benefits of freer expression and the wider dissemination of information will be multiplied over and over and over and over and over . . .

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