Phonebooks are not just an alphabetized and categorized collection of land line numbers, they are an everyday article with numerous uses. Right now, I am using a one-inch thick Metro Manila Residential Listings (white pages) as a mouse pad. It doesn’t only offer a smooth, relatively dust-free surface for my mouse, it also acts as a God send for my wrist, particularly my pisiform bone. Phone books are the martyrs of the household, a furniture incarnated as a catalog of the vast connected masses and sacrificed to the gods of household imperfection. But they are vanishing physically. This is most evident to one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the world. The New York Times reports that as more people come to live in Manhattan, from 10,000 additional residents per annum to 1.6 million this year Verizon’s phonebooks have trimmed down 142 pages from 2006. In fact, instead of expanding, this year’s phonebook is the smallest since Verizon published its first in 2001. What’s even more shocking is that some households don’t even use land line anymore, as much as 7.2 per cent of all households in America, TNS Telecom reports. It’s a creeping sort of change, evoking feelings of nostalgia for one Rutgers Professor. “People would meet someone, want to know where they lived, and look up their name in the phone book. And there was a certain ritual aspect to it when people would look forward to the new phone book,” Mr. Katz, who chiars the communications department of the university, said. “So in a sense, it was a way of social visibility and social involvement. That whole way of doing things, it seems, has largely disappeared.”
No comments:
Post a Comment