THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING ADDRESS BOOK

By Pico Iyer

As one of those quaintly Jurassic old fogies who still keep an address book--more portable than a palmtop, after all--I recently came across a problem: my little book was filling up even though my Christmas-card list was not. In short, the number of my friends was not increasing, but the number of numbers of my friends definitely was. How do I call you? Let me count the ways (even a Catholic hermitage I sometimes have to contact now has two telephone numbers, a fax number and an E-mail address involving the words monks and contemplation).

I'm not, I hasten to point out, a zero when it comes to digits: I've dealt for years with postal code numbers, telex codes and apartment-block addresses like 99-34 67th Road (#6D). But now, all of a sudden, I have to list extension numbers for voice mail, fax numbers for home (thus doubling the number of numbers to list and, in the process, often extending the length of each number, to cope with a digital dearth) and http://'s. To reach a friend a few blocks away, I have to type 38 letters that mean nothing, a numeral, two underlines, an ampersand, a hyphen and two periods, all in a uniform, dotty sequence that will go nowhere if I add a single space or omit a stroke.

My two-room apartment in Japan, where I write this, has an address six lines long that winds through a confounding sequence of dashes, numerals, English words (Memphis Apartments) and lyrical Japanese terms that sound as if they escaped from the Emperor's New Year haiku ("the Southern Slope of Deer" is the meaning of one), all of which is doubly embarrassing since, as everyone knows, the Japanese don't have street addresses. And to call my office from this apartment involves a seven-digit access number, a 14-digit personal code and then another 14 digits. The days when I used to laugh at the Orwellian sterility of North Korean film names (The Report of No. 36, for example) seem remote indeed. And the days when New York City telephone numbers were humanized by letters--"Call me at LUddite 4-2628"--seem positively predigital.

I suppose I first noticed this profusion when first I inscribed a six-digit post-office box number into my book, at almost exactly the same time as ZIP codes (which arrived on our shores only in 1963, to cries of "governmental harassment" from Hunter S. Thompson) began more insistently including four extra digits and a dash. Suddenly, the 213 area code for Los Angeles had sprouted seven alternatives, and French phone numbers were 10 digits long, and my friends were stockpiling spouses' names upon their own. Here in Japan, my three-digit postal code spawned two extra digits, and even as I was writing this, a circular arrived to inform me that, as of next February, my tiny rural neighborhood will get 17 new postal codes, all seven digits long.

Bar codes, PIN codes, tracking numbers and confirmation codes: we live in a sea of irrational numbers. The artist formerly known as Prince now goes by a cryptic glyph, and the most famous shoe company on the planet advertises itself with a swoosh. And even as we pride ourselves on our exfoliating identities, our names seem ever more beside the point. The handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese, for example, was perhaps most significant as the disappearance of a culture of zany hybrids--Sir Run Run Shaw, Philemon Choi and Freedom Leung--into one where there are 4,000 Zheng Yangs in a single city, and Wangs and Zhengs alone account for 160 million people, or more than live in Britain, France and Spain combined. The 20th anniversary of Star Wars is the 20th anniversary of celebrating heroes called R2D2 and C-3PO (who can make even HAL sound human).

This explosion of numbers has, of course, dramatically increased the cachet of living number-free; one of the luxuries of having a house in the English countryside is that, omitting the postal code, you can have an address made up entirely of words (viz. "Mr. Toad, Toad Hall, nr. Rat's Hole, Grahame's Head, Oxfordshire, England"). Yet somehow the figures always catch up with you in the end: villages in the Cotswolds have local phone codes five digits long--as long, in fact, as the numbers themselves. And it must be confessed that one of the only "analog" addresses in my book is, in fact, the one in North Korea.

So even as our small-world omni-accessibility reduces our identities to IDs, and you into u ("While-U-Wait"), our coordinates multiply daily. Not long ago, one of my oldest friends gave me his number in Tokyo, his office number in Tokyo, his home fax number, his office fax number, his home and office numbers in Hong Kong, his fax numbers in both places, a 1-800 number for his voice mail, his mobile number, his mother's fax number, his office's fax number in London, his E-mail address--and the toll-free number for calling his voice mail from Japan. Since that happy day, Tokyo numbers have expanded to eight digits, Hong Kong numbers have acquired an extra 2, and the city code for central London has actually tripled in size, gaining first a 7 and then a 1. And the R section in my address book? It's all used up.