See subject.
It would be so nice.
And more and more people are ditching their land lines.
Because nobody wants the spam that it would bring.
In the beginning (less and less so nowadays) cell phone minutes were very limited and very expensive. People didn’t want people they didn’t know and personally give their number calling them.
If you think of the traditional white pages, they were quite regional. With nationwide “local” calls (not ‘long-distance’), and portable phone numbers, you would need a nationwide phone book, it would be pretty big…
And now we have the internet – who wants a big book anyway?
Likely that even the carriers wouldn’t want all that traffic.
Also cellphone accounts are much, much more ‘fluid’ than landlines. I wouldn’t be surprised if say 50,000 cellphone accounts were added/removed *everyday *in just the US alone. The other reason is cellphones becoming smartphones. Like every other paper-based resource (newspapers, magazines etc.) the internet has made phone books obsolete.
People that want their phone numbers widely known have a number of options like facebook or linked in to make their number widely known. For the rest of us one of the advantages of ditching the land line is that you have an unlisted number. Granted it is a small advantage the main one being that the land line is does not really have much added value in these times of unlimited talk on cell phones.
Society is too dangerous nowadays. In the good old days you could put your name and phone number and address in public information without worry. Now you might get stalked and murdered
On the contrary, society is much safer than it has been in many decades. Murder rates are way down, lower than at any point since 1970.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/images/murderrate.png
Similarly, almost all other forms of violent crime, presumably including stalking, are also down.
I neglected to add, because I thought it unnecessary, that white pages stood for “publicly available directory.”
Having an unlisted number was desirable, I suppose, insofar as the phone companies would charge for it (the technological costs are trivial). And it had the cachet of something special for celebrities.
Phone listings and security:
How do you know that the person is female?
The phone book entry has only initials, not name.
Women were advised to not broadcast their sex by showing a first name. But only women used just initials.
The term was ‘Catch-22’.
So that means that you can only call someone if they ave given you their number, right? Wha if you need to talk to them and they don’t have a landline?
I get junk calls on my cell phone and many advertising texts (mostly from AT&T) almost daily. They might as well have a directory.
In the old days the phone company would charge you for an unlisted number and claim it was because everyone WANTS to be listed in the phone book. So to unlist you costs them. Yeah right, everyone wanted that. I never came across anyone that wanted that. I’m sure there were a few, but I never met anyone.
In the beginning, as you suggest, all cell phone plans metered by air time. In the U.S. you are charged for outgoing as well as incoming calls. So nobody wanted to pay for unwanted incoming calls. However, in the beginning there was no such thing as portable phone numbers; if you changed carriers you had to get a new number. Carriers might also require you get a new number if you changed geographic locations. So this was not a driver for unlisted numbers.
As for books, the “white pages” referenced in the OP title does not have to refer to a paper book.
What data shows that anybody is being stalked and murdered based on their phone book listing? There have been a handful of very isolated cases of harassment, like anti-abortionists publishing info on doctors who provide abortions, but this is not enough of a problem to drive phone company policy.
They still charge for it. I have an unlisted number on my landline phone. I don’t know how old you are–maybe you never met anyone over 30. But there was a time not so long ago[sup]1[/sup] that, yes, everybody wanted to be listed because a phone listing was the only way people could find you, and everybody wanted to be found. Yes, people had email addresses earlier than that but there has never been an effective directory of email addresses, probably never will be. It was worth putting up with a few sales calls to allow your cousin or friend from school to be able to reach you. Everybody still wants to be found, except now they want to be found on Facebook or Twitter instead of by their phone number.
- About 10 years ago, prior to MySpace, Facebook, etc.
And you could be charged for INCOMING calls.
I, and many other men I knew, also had initials only, precisely to avoid the Catch-22. It was kinda like putting the toilet lid down: cost nothing, helped others.
Also that there are multiple cellular carriers, and at the time of the white pages, well in the hey-day of the white pages only one phone company, so far easier to compile every person’s phone number then today.
The reason I always heard back in the days that information calls (now directory assistance) calls were free was that it increased the number of such calls and it cost them money. Now that everyone has a web site, they can put their number there if they like.
When I was a kid, aunt listed her phone number under a fake male name (with the same first initial) in order to avoid the catch-22. Phone company let her do it. But I think there were a fair number of men who also used initials. I could be wrong.
Cite?
My understanding is that this is absolutely untrue. If you live in America today—especially if you are white and you are a man—you are safer from intentional human-on-human violence than you would have been 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or any other time and place in the entirety of human history.