Some little thoughts

[brainwane]

I wonder whether area code redlining was a thing (a very hasty search does not turn up anything) stopping people in different neighborhoods from easily talking with each other across racial lines.

Maybe TNG : Ramayana : DS9 :: Mahabharata? And Data is a bit like Hanuman and Odo is a bit like Karna.... But Picard : Rama :: Sisko : ?

In an era of very low media/consumer choice and availability, Book Of The Month and monthly record subscription clubs were popular. The rise of subscription box services comes as consumers have so much choice and availability that we desire better discoverability and curation for that choice. And book clubs also provide some of the same value; "this is the book we're reading" also helps the reader say no to other new books (for now) and ignore the rest of the To Be Read pile.

Some people are actually fine, most of the time, with probabilistic communication and not being certain that they're hearing or being heard properly. This is tough for me to grasp.

Comments

[ccommack]

The original 1947 NANP area codes are far too large to have systemic bias built into them, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that over the subsequent 72 years, there have been serious shenanigans in the evolution of the system. Those shenanigans including but not limited to: the choice to split an exhausted area code vs. overlaying a new code onto the territory of the old one, or choosing the boundaries of a split, or determining which side of a split area code got to keep the old number and which side had to learn a new one.

Actually, that last one is totally a documented thing; the traditional method is by which side has more business telephone numbers, because updating those records (and PBX systems) is considered more difficult than changing residential numbers. So city centers and cities proper tend to keep the old area code numbers, while the suburbs get a new one; the class and racial valence of this has obviously shifted drastically since the 1990s and the Great Inversion.

I don't know how you want to treat the one really deliberate case of bias in the 1947 area codes: bigger, more economically important cities were deliberately assigned lower numbers because 1s and 2s take less time to dial on a rotary telephone than 8s, 9s, and 0s.

[brainwane]

Thanks for the info and pointers! Am regretting I don't have more spare time to dive in right now, otherwise I would be settling in with a beverage and opening tabs....