June 7, 2007
As Cellphones Multiply, Phone Books Get Slimmer
The fat phone book, a fixture of the urban American household in the last century, is losing some of its girth as more people give up their land lines for cellphones. When they do, their names disappear from the phone book. The New York Times reports.
"In Manhattan, the population in recent years has been growing at an annual rate of about 10,000 people, to about 1.6 million residents now. But the 2007 Verizon White Pages was 142 pages smaller than the 2006 edition.
The story is the same in other cities.
... Cellphones may make it easier for people to reach each other, yet Americans are very guarded about whom they want calling them.
But what people gain in privacy is lost in a sense of community, reflected in shrinking phone books, said James E. Katz, chairman of the communications department at Rutgers University.
“People would meet someone, want to know where they lived, and look up their name in the phone book. And there was a certain ritual aspect to it when people would look forward to the new phone book,” Mr. Katz said. “So in a sense, it was a way of social visibility and social involvement. That whole way of doing things, it seems, has largely disappeared.”
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