Does anyone fax anymore?
Charles Apple just blogged about his vast business card collection and in my current role as VizEds ambassador and editorial consultant I have collected hundreds of business cards as well.
I also have spent dozens of hours entering contact information from these cards and I noticed that I never, I mean never ever, enter anyone’s fax number. I am not a faxer.
I neither send nor want to receive faxes and I just wonder if I am alone. Have we moved on? Is not faxing another one of those ‘generational” divides?
Why IS there a fax number on your business card? Wouldn’t your Skype, GMAIL, AIM, MSN or Yahoo! screen name serve you better?
I had to send a fax to PayPal the other day (To qualify the Visual Editors Foundation account to be properly classifed as belonging to a non-profit) and they insisted that the business could only be conducted via a fax.
Maybe faxing is important to lawyers and bankers but I could have just as easily scanned the tax documents as a PDF and emailed it to them. The paper on the other end is still coming out . . .
I suppose I could have used eFax to do exactly that same thing - but sending one fax a year doesn’t justify $16.95 a month. Got be a good steward of the non-profit’s resources.
I haven’t used faxes since the mid-90s when I was ordering illustrations by the dozen for the Chicago Tribune. But that was a dial-up era and, well, just about every step in the illustration business was analog.
Same thing with land lines - haven’t had one in the house in over seven years. That is not so uncommon but it does provide more evidence that different age groups communicate differently.
I am lucky in my work to be in regular contact with a wide-ranging age of contacts and have observed some key differences in getting things done.
Students will IM or SMS (called ‘texting’ in the U.S. and ‘SMS’ just about everywhere else) you before they will call you or e-mail you. And they might subscribe to your Twitter feed or Facebook feed before any of that. They are always using a mobile and only rarely do they make phone calls with them.
People a little younger than me like to Skype, and chat in a wide variety of IM clients. They are always on a laptop it seems. And they usually will have a conversation with me while also being involved in at least one other chat with someone else.
People around my age tend to communicate heavily through e-mail and I almost can’t get anything actually done with a baby boomer until I talk with them on the phone. I know I tend to use e-mail as a poor man’s chat machine. I may be a digital man, but I was an analog kid and some habits take longer to break.
That is my experience, what’s yours? Oh and, do you fax?
BTW here’s the best way to contact me.
If I were a reporter, I’d have a fax number on my business card, because lots of people still fax press releases. As an editor, I have no use for a fax (though thanks to some time spent in office work, I’m one of few people my age who know how to correctly use one) but I would if I were writing, especially for a daily paper.
I don’t know if society as a whole has moved on from faxing. It may be a generational gap, but it’s also one of those things where if the businesses/people you’re dealing with want you to submit stuff by fax, then it really doesn’t matter if you prefer fax or not. I’ve been dealing with a bunch of vendors lately in planning my wedding, and half of them requested exchanging forms by fax while the other half preferred e-mail. I myself would prefer scanning and e-mailing over fax, but I think that because the circle of people that designers tend to deal with are very technology-minded, it might give us a misconception about exactly how far along the rest of society is in adopting technology. I work with many people who are very intelligent, but on more than a few occasions, I’ve heard the office manager having to explain to them how to use the scanner. I’ve also had friends my age (mid- to late 20s) who have some of the communication habits listed here but are also not very computer-savvy when it comes to anything beyond e-mail and word processing.
As far as conducting business via e-mail, I think I definitely do a lot of that, and I think a lot of people my age do too. In fact, one of the wedding photographers I talked to was talking about how when he contacts potential clients whose info he gathered at bridal shows, the younger ones almost always prefer that the initial contact be via e-mail rather than phone. I think the non-intrusive nature of e-mail is what makes it so appealing. And I’ve noticed in myself and others my age something that’s almost an aversion to human contact when conducting certain businesses. In some cases, we seem to prefer dealing with an online computer system than talking to flesh and blood. Case in point: I have come to dread it now whenever I have to order pizza over the phone rather than online.
I’m usually hesitant to put my AIM screenname on my business card because it gives anyone access to my away messages and profile without me knowing. Whereas on skype and gmail, I have to approve them as a contact before we chat. So for me it’s really a matter of privacy.
I also think I’m less likely to get phone calls from people I don’t know very well rathern than IMed. That’s another reason why I like facebook. It’s an excellent way to make casual semisocial contacts without being too intrusive.