The yellow pages? I did turn to them two years back when our then-infant managed to stick something mysterious in the toilet and we had an emergency Saturday plumbing emergency. But the white pages? I can't recall the last time I used them to look up a person's phone number, and neither can many Americans.

Phone companies like Verizon and AT&T have been pushing for regulatory permission to stop distributing the white pages to people's homes for some time. AT&T hasn't passed out white pages in Indiana for a couple of years, though it will provide a copy on request. Verizon has secured permission from states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida to stop mass distribution as well, and it's currently making the same case to Virginia regulators.

On August 3, Verizon asked the Virginia State Corporation Commission for a waiver of the white pages rule (PDF). According to the company, people have shifted their phone lookups to the Internet. Besides, "the annual printing and distribution of such directories imposes environmental costs in terms of tons of paper used and energy consumed in printing, binding, and distributing the directories." It also costs money to print, and unlike the yellow pages, residents don't pay for inclusion in the white pages.

Instead, Verizon would keep its listings online for no charge and would deliver white pages to any household that requests them. Yellow pages and their included government directories will continue to be printed. Anyone interested in making comments on the proposal can do so electronically—or by filing "an original and fifteen (15) copies of any comments on the issues associated with the application with the Clerk of the Commission c/o Document Control Center." Which is itself a nice reminder of how much more convenient digital technology can be.

Does anyone care about the white pages anymore? Robert Thompson, a "pop culture professor" at Syracuse, told the AP that "anybody who doesn't have access to some kind of online way to look things up now is probably too old to be able to read the print in the white pages anyway." Ha—old people and their declining eyesight!

But it's not as though paper itself is a worthless technology. For instance, our household continues to use more specialized paper directories if we need to look up acquaintances from church or work, and it's arguably faster than the time it would take to locate an electronic device, fire it up, open a browser, find a white pages site, enter the last name and the city, and get a result. And our collective eyesight is fine.