We don’t really see fax machines so much nowadays but they were a really magical and fun invention when I was a kid. Photocopiers have survived way better than fax machines and are very cool too but less so than the fax. I remember early modems (when you had to get this an an additional device for your computer) would have sending faxes as a key listed feature. But outside of hotel foyers and I’m guessing law firms they’re not a thing really any more.
I think the joy of the fax was the pure materiality of it. You put a piece of paper in at one end, watch it get slowly sucked into the machine and listen to all the satisfying modem sounds. At the other end a (literal) facsimile emerges on shiny thermal printer paper that never quite gets rid of its curve from going over the heat roller. The transmission between the sender and recipient doesn’t remain, just the original document and the copy, now a fresh document in its own right.
On the face of it faxes, emails and DMs all have a very similar function: to transmit information from one person to another. All three have an input message, make an electronic copy, and then display it for someone else. However the things they emphasise are completely different.
- Email permanently stores the message in the sender’s outbox and the recipients inbox, making a digital copy that both people can access in perpetuity.
- DMs, depending on implementation, either act the same as emails or only actually exist on the vendor’s remote server and what both people see is a copy of this.
- Faxes however delete the transmission after it’s happened. Despite them being possible to be sent digitally now there is no fax machine ‘outbox’ apart from the original document. The piece of paper it comes on is the same thing as the information transmitted, not a reproducible print off like you would do for an email.
My friend honor asks “Should data expire?” and I think this is a great question and suggest that a fax machine is actually a perfect technology for creating more ephemeral communications. Even though I’m sure the ISP or phone company does keep a copy of fax transmissions and it could be digitally reproduced there’s something really nice about the idea you send it once, it makes a new document, and then that piece of paper has to be processed or thrown away. The only thing that comes close to this nowadays is disappearing messages, but that feels more like something out of Mr Robot than a tool to make us value our communication and communication storage more.
It’s romantic, and while I’m sure some people reading this are probably mentally mumbling about paper and toner use and the environment right now and I probably agree, I think as a design pattern it’s really interesting. I did some archive volunteering once upon a time and it’s wild how after typewriters gave way to hotmail accounts the (literal) paper trail runs dry. Most communication for most modern social movements is now lost to forgotten passwords and automated account deletion. There’s something to be said for a hard copy.