If moving to the US has taught me anything it’s that, despite globalisation, America and Britain remain two countries divided by common levels of technological advancement.
Take alphanumeric phone numbers. The Americans have had them for years, and today you’re not allowed to advertise on cable TV here unless you can be reached at 1-800-AMBULANCE-CHASER or 1-800-ERECTILE-DYSFUNCTION or somesuch. And yet in Britain advertisers remain unconvinced that phone numbers should be memorable. I mean, why can’t customers just write them down?The opposite is true of SMS messaging. In the UK, we’ve been texting for over a decade to the point where we’re totally comfortable with using it for everything from voting on rubbish TV programmes to paying important bills. Oh, and occasionally communicating with our friends. The Americans, on the other hand, are much more likely to make an actual phone call to do those things.It’s only recently that those two technologies have made it - travelling in opposite directions - across the Atlantic.
Alphanumeric numbers are finally starting to show up on British adverts, just in time for the Internet to make them redundant. Ironically, we probably have text messaging to thank for making us finally understand that the number 2 can equal ‘ABC’, 3 equals ‘DEF’ and so on. The yanks, for their part, are slowly getting the hang of SMS, partly thanks to TV voting but mainly due to the proliferation of full keyboards on phones. Your average British teen would laugh their arse off watching an American trying to peck out an SMS on a Nokia 8210’s keypad. It’s truly comical.