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Written by Caryn Rousseau
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Wednesday, 05 April 2006 |
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Rappers shout them and phone companies tout them. They’re those three little digits before actual phone numbers: the area code.
There was a time when the code had territorial cred — 212 is synonymous with New York City, 312 is Chicago, 213 is Los Angeles. But now major metropolitan areas can have a half-dozen or more area codes — and even those have become portable.
Few people change their cell phone numbers as they move around the country. Experts say with all the area code splitting, those little prefixes are losing their old meaning, fast. But have they gained a new meaning?
Say, a personal one? It doesn’t matter where someone lives, you can still be from your hometown via your cell phone, says Andy Kavoori, editor of “The Cell Phone Reader: Essays in Social Transformation” and a University of Georgia communications professor.
“As the global economy changes you need new ways to identity where you’re from,” he said. “And the area code number is one of those ways. It creates psychological affiliations in place of physical ones.” Paul Levinson, author of “Cell Phone: The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium”, says the area code will soon bleed into the rest of a person’s phone number to act as a sort of numerical social identifier.
“We’re well on the way to people having permanent phone numbers associated with their name like Social Security numbers are, that will be a more permanent indicator,” Levinson said.
Phone numbers used to start with two letters, going back decades before area codes were even developed, but then the phone companies switched to three-digit numerical codes and had them directly relate to places, Levinson said.
“They did research to what the most easiest remembered numbers were,” he said. “New York got 212. Los Angeles got 213, that was the next easiest, from there it went on. Then what happened was the demand for phone service was growing at such a rate the phone company began dividing up other old area codes which did have meaning into new area codes.” “That was the beginning of the end,” he said. | Only registered users can write comments.
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