Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel says that when a new Bell South phone book got dropped off at her family’s home last fall, she was stunned by the size—or rather, lack thereof.
“It was a mere fraction of the thick volume the phone book once was. No one could use this pamphlet-size publication as a booster seat. It was a dinosaur—a little one—from an era long passed,” Riegel writes. “I pointed this out to our kids … They couldn’t at all relate.”
So at a subsequent family dinner with her sister and family, Riegel says, the middle-aged adults at the table all waxed nostalgic about the excitement that surrounded the arrival of the new phone book when they were kids.
“Perhaps you remember. For a middle schooler on a long summer afternoon, the phone book was an endless source of entertainment and a window on the outside world, which seemed bigger and more exotic before we were all connected online,” Riegel writes. “With the phone book you could look up the address of the cute boy (or girl) you’d just met and call people you shouldn’t. You could prank call your teachers, and check with the neighborhood drug store—back when they still had neighborhood drug stores—to see if the latest movie star magazine or comic book or Wacky Packages stickers had come in. Then you could ride your bike to go buy them. The phone book was golden.”
Riegel says her memories of professional life before omnipresent technology are fuzzier.
“I honestly cannot remember how we did our jobs, particularly in the journalism profession, without the endless resources of the Internet always at our fingertips,” she writes. “The thing is we did it, all of us, and we did it well. Technology has changed the way we do our jobs and order our lives, and if statistics are to be believed, it has made us more productive and efficient. But it hasn’t necessarily made us better at much of anything. We crank out more work, more quickly from more offsite locations. Maybe we even know more, factually, because we have ready access to more information. But we aren’t necessarily better at using it, nor are we putting it to better use.”
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