The culmination of all this is the smart card. Subject to more clever marketing, home banking will develop to overtake regular banking. The borders between social institutions will blur. Home and office will merge. So will the office, the car, the aeroplane and the hotel.
Many hotels provide their guests with business centres.
Instead of moving among rigidly defined, well separated, both spatially and temporally, realms of living modern Man will flow, in an almost seamless flux, between one definition and another. One of the grandest revolutions within this sub-trend of blurring is the functional merger of banks and retail outlets. On the face of it, this should have constituted no surprise. This power generated awe and respect. In the last two decades, major retailers tried their hand in banking activities not too successfully.