RICHMOND, Va. — What’s black and white and read all over? Not the white pages, which is why regulators have begun granting telecommunications companies the go-ahead to stop mass-printing residential phone books, a musty fixture of Americans’ kitchen counters and refrigerator tops.
In the past month, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania approved Verizon’s request to quit distributing residential white pages, which first appeared in 1878 in New Haven, Conn.
Telephone companies argue that most consumers now check the Internet rather than flip through pages when they want to reach out and touch someone. But their secondary uses — child booster seats and door stops — remain slices of Americana.
If the white pages are nearing their end, then doctoral student Emily Goodmann hopes the directories will be archived for historical, genealogical or sociological purposes.
“The telephone directory stands as the original sort of information network that not only worked as kind of a social network in a sense, but it served as one of the first information resources,” said Goodmann, left, who is writing her dissertation on the history of phone books as information technology. The Associated Press; AP photo
