E.T. phone home

I remember seeing Steven Spielberg's movie, E.T., in the early 80's with good friends. Our oldest son was just a toddler when the movie appeared in theaters, and to this day, it's still my favorite Spielberg flick! Watching it on DVD last weekend with my family was a treat. In one memorable scene, E.T. points to the phone and says to Elliot, "E.T. phone home," and of course this was not possible, since E.T. was an extra terrestial from a distant planet inaccessible to Pac Bell. But it got me thinking: back in the 1980's and 90's we were a world void of cell phones and blackberry smartphones. Back then, people actually memorized the phone numbers of their top ten friends, wrote important numbers in an address book, and never had trouble remembering their home phone. Yesterday I overheard a mother/daughter conversation taking place in a check out line at our local grocery store. The daughter, in her early teens, was on her cell, and had paused during her conversation to find her home phone number in her "contacts" list for the person on the other end. "You don't know our home phone number?," the mom exclaimed in a state of shock. "Well, I just wasn't sure of the last two digits," her daughter retorted.
So I'm throwing this question out into the cosmos: Have we become a world too dependent on iphones, blackberries, and the internet? If we misplace or heaven forbid, loose our cell phone, would we be able to find our way to a "White Pages" to phone home? (Using someone else's cell phone of course, since pay phones are now obsolete.) If the world wide web crashed, would we?
Call me old school, but I still prefer to memorize numbers (a throw back from years of memorizing play scripts), and I'd be perfectly content to go back to Big Chief tablets, typewriters, and snail mail. (I loved getting letters in the mail!)

P.S. My niece just asked, "What are White Pages?" Arrrgh!