I was returning home yesterday and after passing the mailbox I looked down and saw a stack of brand new telephone books, unopened, still wrapped in their heavy plastic coating. Those books had been there for the better part of two months, gathering dust and detritus including several leaves, and additional phone books. Not only had nobody picked up a book, but the pile had actually GROWN, That was when it stuck me.
Telephone books are obsolete
When I moved to Virginia I had brought phone books from New York, Books that I never opened. Two pound tomes roughly the size of a really detailed graphic novel. (as there really weren't that many people in Upstate New York). I was confronted with the size of the metro area I was moving into in a very tangible way when i was presented the Virgina Phone book, initially it appeared as though everyone in the state was listed, but no, only those who I could encounter should I desire to in the expanse of a day.
I never Used that book either.
Google killed the phone book. locale-based searches via Google maps have made the answer for "where's the nearest pizza place" ridiculously easy to find. further meditations upon this as we approach the 3G horizon (assuming the telephone companies don't screw that up as well) yield all kinds of interesting notions. My children will likely never understand the reference to yellow book. Alphabetization, a task that I learned as it was necessary to try and find information in an encyclopedia, a phone book, or even a dictionary... has become something that we teach children for no apparent reason, an arbitrary hierarchical data structure that has become obsolete.
