That’s what the phone book described—it put names to numbers, translated people and companies into machine language; the machine was the whole network, the whole throbbing unified monopolistic Bell beast. It was supposed to be a guide to the town, but I remember the phone book as a territory unto itself, the first space made of information that I ever explored. Is there anything like that today, any single document with creators so naïve as to believe that they could deliver all that humans had to offer in black Bell Centennial on white, blue, and yellow paper, indexed, tagged, and sorted? And will there ever again be humans so naïve as to believe that when they held a book they held a world, as I believed?
Greg Cohn's (Other) Blog
Technology innovation enthusiast, entrepreneur, dad. Founder of Ad Hoc Labs (makers of Burner); living in Los Angeles and probably oversharing on Twitter.
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2012-08-21 1 note
Source: ftrain.com
