Phone books: Facebook 0.01

From Reason.com, a review of Ammon Shea's The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads, which explores some of the remarkable technologies that were prefigured by the idea of publishing a whole city's contact information in one universally available directory.

The phone itself was a pretty big deal, of course, helping intimacy transcend proximity. But phone books provided a crucial element to the system: intrusiveness. In the beginning of 1880, Shea writes, there were 30,000 telephone subscribers in the U.S. At the end of the year, that number had grown to 50,000, and because of phone books, each one of them was exposed to the others as never before. While many American cities had been compiling databases of their inhabitants well before the phone was invented, listing names, occupations, and addresses, individuals remained fairly insulated from each other. Contacting someone might require a letter of introduction, a facility for charming butlers or secretaries, a long walk.

Phone books eroded these barriers. They were the first step in our long journey toward the pandemic self-surveillance of Facebook. "Hey strangers!" anyone who appeared in their pages ordained. "Here's how to reach me whenever you feel like it, even though I have no idea who you are."

By the Book (via Kottke)

• [Roy Trumbull]

  There were city directories that predated the phone book. Most major cities had them. That’s how you looked up someone’s address. They were segregated with a separate section for colored residents.

  • [Cochituate]

    Yeah, I was signing in to make that point as well. I found city directories going back to the 1830s, in Essex County Massachusetts, allowing me to trace back my family that far. I’ve seen Boston and Manhattan directories going back to the same era. They are the obvious ancestor of the phonebook. Each of these listed the address of the person, their occupation, and were a font of knowledge.

• [Anonymous]

  It’s not entirely true that no one reads the phone book.

  I have a friend who was a DJ for an online radio station that featured a chat channel to go with the station. The listeners in chat kept giving her guff about her choice in music one night and it finally pissed her off. She pulled out a phone book and read out names and phone numbers for about a half an hour. It’s amazing how much more receptive people became to her choice of music after that.

• [omnivore]

  The wikipedia entry on Ammon Shea doesn’t appear to state his birthdate, but photos of him indicate he’s in his thirties.

  I haven’t read the book – might, though – but I wonder if he understands that the constraint that stops people from doing things in society is not a lack of means to do so. In the case of using the phone in ways analogous to the “self-surveillance” of FB, it was a change in attitudes about other people’s privacy that had little to do with phone books. Mr. Shea has probably never lived in a society that had those attitudes, and so cannot easily imagine the actual constraints that existed.

  My own theory is that it probably had more to do with the rise of the service economy, the decline of the secure job – in short, with Reaganite attitudes, which encouraged people to see society as an exploitable resource rather than an accommodating, structuring element in their lives.

  Milan Kundera has written at length about the comparative value that privacy had for those in Eastern Europe, and the society he found when he made it to the West. His observations came at the point when the assault on privacy was just beginning – worth reading, and maybe something Mr Shea would find interesting.

• [Anonymous]

  Wow. The classist assumptions in that excerpt are staggering. Does Shea really think that the layers of social insulation were the norm for the bulk of the fifty million people in the Untidy States in 1880?

  Introductions in the urban lower classes tended more toward a hearty “OI!” in the street.

  Certainly, that early-adopter 0.1% of the population almost certainly dwelt in the economic strata where butlers, social secretaries, and formal Letters of Introduction were the norm — or worked in trades which catered to such clientele — but when push comes to shove, the 1880 telephone was a tool for rich people to contact other rich people. It was another layer of social exclusivity, and the phone book was just a cheaper, terser edition of “Who’s Who”.

• [Wordguy]

  That reminds me of one of my favorite bits from The Onion:
  http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-phone-book-raising-serious-privacy-issues,4321/

• [Chris Williams]

  Hmm . . . Not sure about the US UK but the UK has has trade directories since the 1780s, and they were essentially ubiquitous by the 1840s. Google ‘Historical Directories’ to find a large online stash of them.

  If I wasn’t so busy I might try to review this for _Surveillance and Society_, making use of my standard surveillance studies trope “Not all of this is new, you know”.

• [hatchclown]

  The Bible: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads