It seems that the day of lifting a weighty phone book from one’s doormat and excitedly checking through it to see who is or who isn’t still around since last year, are long gone.

With the wealth of personal & residential information available to all on the internet, there really is no need for this information to be printed in these enormous Ikea-catalogue style books that take too long to sift through.

Simply type a name, a street name, a city and Bob’s your uncle; everything you need to know to find Bob is right there on the screen.

Telephone Book Torn in Half

When I was little I used to marvel at the size of telephone directories and wonder how they fit everyone into that book

 

Obsessive Social Networking

Telecommunications has transformed to an unrecognisable status over the years. If you’d have said even 5 years ago that we’d all be living our lives with a live online audience, I’d have giggled and shook my head.

Now, we cook dinner, update our status to an amusing cooking anecdote about pastry, we take a photo of the dinner, upload it to Facebook, Flikr, Twitter, etc, invite our friends over and then tag them at ‘my house’. Then thank the said friends via one of these mediums while they are still sitting opposite you at the table, they themselves commenting on your status or tagging themselves in your picture of the pavlova.

How we people search is no different.

It all started with Friends Reunited. We began signing up to find out what happened to Emma, the girl you hated from school back in the nineties. You were glad to read she’d had 4 children before the age of twenty and still lived with her mother. (intended to be taken in a light hearted manner :-))

Then Genes Reunited began and you were able to build a family tree and trace long lost relatives, in manner of Jeremy Kyle reunion specials.

Searching for someone was a once time-consuming and often frustrating wild goose chase that lead to little.

Now, everyone is traceable, no one can hide.

I don’t wish to sound like an ominous narrator. Remember Reggie Perrin? He rose and he fell, disappeared from his tedious life and started a new one, not that much further away than his original one.

No one looked him up on facebook, traced him on Foursquare or checked to see where he last tweeted from. He was able to start afresh. Not that disappearing from one’s responsibilities is a good thing, but still… It’s the freedom of knowing you can, that I find appealing.

I guess it wouldn’t be too hard to disappear nowadays, even with all this technology.

Throw out your Sat Nav, delete all your social networking accounts, cancel your phone contract, close your bank account, throw away all your paperwork and just get on a train for Inverness. Then you have the abundance of CCTV cameras filming your disappearing act, to contend with. Shame.

Anyhow, phone books do represent an era of simplicity.

When I was little I used to marvel at the size of telephone directories and wonder how they fit everyone into that book. If you think of the vastness of the web and the sheer volume of information, people and content available at just a few clicks of the mouse, the mind reels, boggles and does somersaults. But for most people it doesn’t. Most people take our current resources for granted and have long forgotten the time before these resources were undiscovered.

And when you made a date with a friend, you just took their word for it that they would turn up at a certain place at a certain time. You couldn’t text or BBM them your journey progress and let them know you’d be a bit late, or change the places slightly. You stuck to plans because there was no way of changing them on the go.

 

Postcodes

There was also a time that if you didn’t know someone’s postcode before sending them a card or letter, you were screwed. Or you had to trudge all the way down to your local post office and ask. Imagine that!

 

Be thankful, ladies and gentlemen, that you only need to type a small amount of information into an online people finder to access someone.

Phone books never looked so heavy.

 

Susannah Plomer is a journalist and blogger with particular interest in communications. She blogs for White Pages, where you can find a postcode in a matter seconds, unlike the chunky and disused telephone directories of the past.

 

Telephone Book Torn in Half
Share This