Daily Nonsense

While browsing on the Interwebs today I found this article that discusses 6 technologies that don’t know they are dead.  And the first one I saw, the phonebook, has been a thorn in my side now for so many years I just had to post it.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I used a physical phonebook.  Really, I’m not just being dramatic.  We’ve had broadband Internet for at least 6 years, so it’s been at least that much time.

So, for at least six years I’ve been stumbling over three separate SERIES of phonebooks on my front porch each year.  You’ve got your Dex, your Quest publication and your ‘Real’ Yellow Pages (whatever the heck that means).  So, three times a year I dump the phonebooks into the recycle bin and felt abused for a couple of days.  Abused because of the tree that had to die so that a #13.9 billion dollar industry could stay alive.  What a waste.

Slate has a nice article about the senseless and archaic icons of the 1960’s and ’70’s ‘reach out and touch someone’ campaign.  But right now I’m more interested in the 6 Technologies that just won’t die.

Tech Zombies: 6 Technologies That Don’t Know They’re Dead

By CRACKED Staff, Luke McKinney

#6. Phone Books

An incredible 615 million phone books were printed last year, most of which were used to replace missing legs on sofas or were ripped apart in Youtube videos.

About another million tons of these useless blocks will be shipped out to households and offices next year, where an increasing number will make a U Turn at the front porch and head to the landfill without ever being opened. William Rathke, an anthropologist who studies garbage, says you can "dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake." Rathke, who despite digging through trash for a living has his Ph.D. from Harvard, claims phone books account for about 10-30% of the trash at your local dump.

In an era when you can fit many gigabytes onto a device small enough to be swallowed by a cat and even your local bait shop has a website, phone companies still want us to find phone numbers the same way we did 100 years ago: by dragging out a bulky, ten-pound list printed on dead trees.

Why are they still around?
Since you’ve probably never opened one, you may not realize that phone books are chock full of so many ads that they generated $13.9 billion last year. That sort of makes sense when you realize these ads are being force fed to every single household in America, like giant bricks of spam just appearing on your porch once a year. The only difference is you can click out of a pop up ad. Phone books weigh 10 lbs and have to be disposed of in special ways, to avoid becoming even more than 30% of your local landfill. Yes, it would appear that Satan works in advertising, and he’s damn good at what he does.

But even though it reaches twice as many homes as the Super Bowl, does it get past the doorstep of those homes anymore? Are there really $13.9 billion worth of people using them? Well yes, if you believe the phone companies, and the people they’ve paid to conduct surveys. And in an industry with no sales figures (because nobody asked for the damn things in the first place) how else are you going to track who actually uses them?

Well there is one way. You could go hunting around in landfills to see if the phone books were thrown away all at once right when everyone got them, creating entire layers of phone book in the earth. You know, like a cake? But who’s bat shit crazy enough to do something like that?

[Thanks, Cracked.com]