Phone books

about phone books

It used to be said of great actors that they could move an audience to tears just by reading the phone book. As everyone knew, the phone book, in its sheer ubiquity, in its stable and predictable presentation of basic information about a community, was the most rote and boring thing imaginable. There was no emotion in it, no surprises. Only such a neutral and unreadable text could do justice to the great actor’s mastery of emotional projection, their ability to generate feeling through their sheer presence and intensity.

Now when I remember them, I think of phone books in and of themselves as moving. It seems hard to believe that the phone company used to drive around and leave a stack of these tomes, hundreds or thousands of pages each, on every doorstep and in every mailbox, and that everybody’s name, address, and number was just printed out for anyone to see. All the local business were there, arranged into somewhat idiosyncratic categories that comprised the entirety of the commercial world. It was vast, but you could page through it all if you wanted to.

Not that it would bring me to tears if I saw one, but phone books fill me with nostalgia on several levels. The Library of Congress has a collection of phone books that one can scroll through here, but it gives very little sense of what it was like to have one. I miss the way it felt to flip through their tissue-thin pages; I miss the low-rent local ads, and the pizzeria coupons that were sometimes stuck in; I miss looking at the endless list of surnames, the mystery of all these other people’s singular lives and destinies unfolding nearby.

I miss phone books too as seemingly underutilized resources, with information about towns that seemed hidden in plain sight. In the 1990s, I moved to a new city where I knew no one, and the phone book was my only guidance. I relied on the blue pages, which provided basic civic information: where government offices and hospitals were, how to get a driver’s license, how to register to vote, and that sort of thing.

And when I would go on road trips, I would typically take the business route into the center of whatever town I happened to be passing through, find a payphone with a phone book attached — they would be in heavy plastic binders, hanging upside-down like bats from the phone’s underside — and then rip out the page with all the thrift stores on it. Sometimes it would already be missing — scavengers must think alike — so I would have to move along to the next Circle K or whatever to find another phonebook to plunder. (A Saturday Evening Post article from the 1950s reported that the phone books in Grand Central Station had to be replaced every 48 hours because “otherwise civilized people have a deplorable habit of tearing out pages.”) Then, with a road atlas, I would try to figure out where the stores were and plot my route. Months later I would find the folded-up pages in the glove compartment where I sometimes saved them, as if I would ever make it back to those towns and would find the stores just like I left them.

It all seems unthinkable now; thrift stores are easy to find on a whim and a Maps search on a phone, and they are all too picked over to be worth seeking out anyway. The phone book serves for me as a symbol of pre-networked times, when there were separate directories for every metropolitan area and there were small opportunities, little pseudo-discoveries to to be found in crossing between them. It was also a time when calling a person who lived more than a few dozen miles from you could cost a few dollars for five minutes.

I assume most younger people haven’t seen a phone book in real life, never handled one, haven’t absorbed how it organized the world as knowable, as static and alphabetical. Though businesses could buy ad space, there was still the palpable impression that all the information in the phone book was uniform, and there was some minuscule advantage available to those companies desperate enough to name their service AAA Bail Bonds or whatever. Other forms of competition were mostly suppressed by its format, which made it seem like a kind of haven. It would be exaggerating to suggest that phone books were experienced as utopian, but they conveyed a commonsense attitude that at some infrastructural level, by at least one setset of one set of bureaucracies, everyone was being treated the same.

Users — though it is a bit anachronistic to call them that — could turn to the yellow pages, and especially the white pages, and experience something that felt like objectivity, facticity. Not only did the phone book list every person and business indiscriminately (unless you demanded to be unlisted); it didn’t attempt to represent within itself how it was supposed to feel to read it or, for the most part, how anyone felt about anything listed in it. It was resolutely non-interactive. Its interface was not “user-friendly.”

Now almost all the information we see is experienced as subjective, algorithmically tailored to take advantage of what the information provider knows about user or their situation. Information is not so much flatly factual but dynamic, capable of being altered or being represented differently depending on who is looking for it. This is sold as giving specific people the specific sorts of information that will most help them, but in practice it isolates users and cuts them off from common ground, from a common orientation toward what is available. The tailored information works to make them more vulnerable than informed, or worse, it makes them misperceive their vulnerability as a their being especially well-informed, so well-informed that they don’t have to understand where the information came from, what validates it, and why it was provided specifically for them.

The phone book could be understood as a shared resource, common to the community and producing a kind of common subject position for all its users; internet information produces an isolated subject who can’t reliably conceive of what other people know, of what sorts of options and idea they have access to, what sorts of commercial categories outline the breadth of their world. AI-generated answers are meant to take this to the logical end point where the information manufactured has no definite connection to empirical reality but is instead made to seem maximally plausible to the user requesting it. (Perhaps at some point, in some metaverse hell, AI models will generate spurious answers and then generate the sensory environments that seem to conform to them.) More than anything, the idea of phone books makes me nostalgic for an era before social media, before personalized surveillance, before algorithmic control.

In the early 2000s, the internet was expected to quickly make phone books extinct, in part because “going online” was still being modeled as a matter of directories and a search for basic, static information about the “real world.” In 2008, a Slate article wondered why phone books were taking so long to die: “They’re having the most absurdly drawn-out death throes of any advertising medium ever known — and yet remain so poorly understood as social history that when they really are gone, we’ll scarcely understand what we’ve lost.” It was only when internet advertising became more organized and viable for small businesses that the yellow pages lost its financial support system and phone books began to vanish from society.

I was thinking about phone books because of the growing sense that in the midst of a range of catastrophes, there are no longer the sorts of information sources that can be trusted not to warp the information provided to make you act in ways they can profit from. All week the news I see has been dominated by despair over the fires in Los Angeles and accounts of various billionaires’ grotesque and unliateral control over much of the social infrastructure that was supposed to replace things like the phone book. Bill Gates famously declared the phone book obsolete in 2007, but it wasn’t as apparent then that such artifacts were obstacles not for society but for the ambitions of the tech barons who have assiduously worked to eliminate what much of what phone books, for better or worse, symbolized.

Ammon Shea, the author of The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads (2010), concludes his book with this peroration:

Glance through the telephone book every once in a while, and pay some small amount of attention to the book that is so often ignored by so many. Don’t bother to read it from beginning to end; dip in and take an exploratory sip. Read over the hundreds of listings of Brown, Schwartz, or Rodriguez, or whatever names happen to be most prevalent in the book held in your lap. Compose your own story based on the characters you meet there, even as you know almost nothing of them. This is a volume of wishes, lies, and dreams, each and every page containing the makings of a story untrammeled by anything except your willingness to invest in it. This is a work that is steeped in the history of the humanity within it, and your experience in browsing through it is fettered only by your imagination.

It’s hard to imagine someone writing something like that about the internet as we know it now, though that sort of browsing was certainly what we were promised.