‘Daddy, what’s a fax?’
The communications curve is taking more twists than ever
Recently I had to physically go to the bank to sign some papers. Beside to use an ATM, I hadn’t been inside a bank for at least seven to eight years. I wanted to handle the transaction via e-mail because I thought the bank could send me the papers and I could sign and e-mail them back. I further protested that the bank has my signature on file from when I opened the account, but there were no ifs, ands, or buts with them. I had to show up in person.
So I went to the bank, and I brought my nine-year-old daughter with me. I filled out the form, and the bank manager said she needed to fax the paper over to some other office. That would take about 10 minutes, the manager said, and I was welcome to wait. As she got up to leave, my daughter asked, “Daddy, what’s a fax?”
At that instance it occurred to me that my daughter will probably never have to use a fax machine. (I don’t even know the last time I used one.) It also occurred to me how even e-mail may be a fading part of my kids’ lives.
Personal communications, for the masses, at its basic level, had been almost static for 100 years after the telephone was invented in 1876. For years, you could either mail or phone. Sometime in the 1970s, the fundamentals started to change. Faxes and pagers emerged. Then in the 1980s, we had cell phones and BBSs. In the 1990s, the masses finally embraced e-mail, the Internet, IMing, and forums. In the first part of this decade, communication went social, and the advancement in smart phones gave us 24/7 access anywhere. Wow! In 20 years we sure did add an awful lot of ways to communicate with each other … and that communication landscape is moving quickly.
It’s changing so fast that within the same generation you have people using different methods of basic communication. So which one will be the winner? For now, all. It is simply about user choice. If my main communication method is social networking, I still may want to receive my notifications from that site via e-mail. Or if I still like talking on the phone, I may want to access my voice mail, but do it via the Internet. Or if I need to send you a signed document, I can choose either e-mail and scanning or fax.
Many users are so far ahead of the communications curve that some industries need to rethink their communications logic and start investing in infrastructure that is going to let the consumer interact with their business on the consumer’s terms. Or they may not have any consumers left in the next few years.
We are at a huge junction in communications and once we take this curve there’s no going back. Things are changing rapidly. Just wait until people start to “Like” your e-mails.
Bryan DeLuca
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