My Copy of The Internet Phone Book

I recently got my copy of the Internet Phone Book. Look who’s hiding on the bottom inside spread of page 32:

The book is divided into a number of categories — such as “Small”, “Text”, and “Ecology” — and I am beyond flattered to be listed under the category “HTML”! You can dial my site at number 223.

As the authors note, the sites of the internet represented in this book are not described by adjectives like “attention”, “competition”, and “promotion”. Instead they’re better suited by adjectives like “home”, “love”, and “glow”.

These sites don’t look to impose their will on you, soliciting that you share, like, and subscribe. They look to spark curiosity, mystery, and wonder, letting you decide for yourself how to respond to the feelings of this experience.

But why make a printed book listing sites on the internet? That’s crazy, right? Here’s the book’s co-author Kristoffer Tjalve in the introduction:

With the Internet Phone Book, we bring the web, the medium we love dearly, and call it into a thousand-year old tradition [of print]

I love that! I think the juxtaposition of websites in a printed phone book is exactly the kind of thing that makes you pause and reconsider the medium of the web in a new light. Isn’t that exactly what art is for?

Kristoffer continues:

Elliot and I began working on diagram.website, a map with hundreds of links to the internet beyond platform walls. We envisioned this map like a night sky in a nature reserve—removed from the light pollution of cities—inviting a sense of awe for the vastness of the universe, or in our case, the internet. We wanted people to know that the poetic internet already existed, waiting for them…The result of that conversation is what you now hold in your hands.

The web is a web because of its seemingly infinite number of interconnected sites, not because of it’s half-dozen social platforms. It’s called the web, not the mall.

There’s an entire night sky out there to discover!