Linda and I killed SYNERGY’s FAX line this week. We had discussed it for a long time and decided it was time to pull the plug.
The last five FAXes we received were ads for “bad-credit-no-problem” mortgages and “who-would-want-to-go-there?” vacation packages. The transmissions were addressed to “All Staff.” Each was in the same format as those we had repeatedly, per federal regulations, asked the supposed sender to remove (540) 351-1702 from their files and their automatic dialers.
Some, e.g., Jim Bacon, have never really liked FAX. While FAX was a vital technology during World War II, it became just a simple tool when compared with the big deals of communications – the Internet and Cell Phones – that exploded in the 90s and the 00s. FAX was a handy, inexpensive technology – that was its downfall. No entity could make a lot of money by doing the things necessary to make FAX continue to be effective – like shaming government agencies into enforcing the regulations intended to support the medium. FAX was allowed to become the pond of bottom-fishers.
The end of FAX is, perhaps, a small loss for civilization but because it is a simple, useful tool it is symbolic of a larger cloud on the horizon on which we will focus in our next column.
EMR