Information Madness

Several weeks ago, I lost my iPhone. In the days waiting for my new one to arrive in the mail, I had to dust off the old landline telephone. Through Facebook I told my friends and family about the situation, and if they needed to get in touch with me immediately to use email and so forth. The phone rarely rang, except for once.

Looking at the number on the caller ID, I realized I was looking for a name to go along with it. None. It was unregistered – only a number showed. Afterward, I performed a reverse phone lookup and discovered the caller was, in fact, my own mother calling from her landline.

It didn't phase me at the moment, but in the weeks since, I've been thinking about how the phone number itself is no longer a reference for most people. When was the last time you typed a number into your phone from memory? It's probably been ages. Whenever you do type a number directly into your phone you're either saving it or calling a number you've just recently acquired and are unlikely to remember later.

Twenty years ago, I would've been able to recite twenty phone numbers of twenty family members and friends. These days, I can barely remember my own number. Yeah, I'm getting old, but there's obviously more to it than that. We simply have the luxury of not having to memorize phone numbers anymore.

That's a shame in my opinion. First off, I'm going to naturally assume that making children memorize phone numbers instead of relying on contacts contributes to bettering their growing minds. Secondly, in the event of an emergency where my iPhone was not with me, it'd be pretty embarrassing and even dangerous if I was unable to call my wife because I couldn't remember the house phone number.

With that said, the telephone number itself was once it's own newfangled way of going about classic telecommunications methods. Before numbers existed, telephone users had to directly connect to operators. Once telephone numbers became popular, people started complaining about how the new way of issuing everyone a “number” was impersonal and made it too easy for people to make calls.

So maybe I'm just this century's version of that kind of curmudgeon. Or maybe we really are saying goodbye to what was once a healthy way for us to securely remain connected. Either way, memorizing phone numbers is without a doubt one of the finer lost arts of 20th century communication.