Paper involves many senses, mainly touch, smell and sight.Touch tells you the type of information that you're reading when you turn the pages (rough for text books or xeroxes, smooth for magazines and illustrated books).The smell of paper can tell you how old an item of information is (inky for recently printed and mouldy or dusty for older texts).The colour of pages can tell you their age.The paper that turns yellow show its old age, but it takes decades to take this degenerative process. The electronic media are very focused on sight.You can guess the type and age of information mainly by the technology implied, like the resolution.
Mining the sea of information on the net, with its unstable characteristics, makes people conscious that paper is a stable memory extension, platform-independent and physically limited.” “Paper has always been perceived as a stable extension of human memory, ‘plataform-independent’ though physically limited. (Alessandro Ludovico)