After dinner at a great New York restaurant this evening, we talked about the fact that the restaurant had printed cards for us to walk away with. In the age of the Internet, with instant Web access to everything, there is something quaint about this retro form of advertising.
My friend pointed out that the card serves other purposes. When you are at work, say, and you want to order out lunch from a great restaurant, you reach into your pocket and hand the card to the person doing the ordering. There is something direct and primal in this physical act, which goes well with the primal act of having a meal.
After all, as Groucho Marx once said: “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.” And presumably, even as technology continues to advance, we will still need to eat. And we might still want to hand physical cards to each other.
But that doesn’t mean that human readable ink needs to be printed on those cards. In an eccescopic world, when we are all wearing those cyber contact lenses, a physical card need only convey the illusion of physical printing. In reality, our personal body computer will be able to look at an infrared pattern on the card, do a rapid look-up, and create a computer graphic simulacrum of printed information.
This has the advantage that every business card becomes an active display. Text can scroll or expand, 3D visual objects can appear to float off the card and animate, or we can use the same physical card to flip rapidly through our entire rolodex.
We would still perform the same physical act of handing a card to another person, because this act makes sense to us. But that act would merely be in support of a charmingly quaint illusion, a relic of a bygone time, much as the sound of a ringing sound on your smart phone supports the charmingly quaint illusion of an actual bell.