ah, cultural change - that’s something I hear a great deal about. But from what cultural starting point to which cultural ending point and who is involved and what is the new culture trying to reflect? The impact of technology on society? The way that technology is impacting on the re-organisation of manufacturing, public services and consumerism?

One tiny little aspect of this that I can never understand but helps reflect what ‘cultural change’ may or may not be is date formats (uh?). Yep, date formats. I usually write dates thus; 23 March 2005. I sometimes write 23-03-2005. I never ever write 2005-05-06 because I can never remember whether this is the 5th of June or the 6th May. So I’m intrigued where the date format in the e-Government Metadata Standard has come from and how that was agreed at an international and national level.

Number formats are very ingrained in social cultural. One of the reasons why the replacement for directory enquiries has failed so miserably (failed for the public that is, some companies have made a pile of money from it) is that very few people can remember who to dial now. More scandalous is that research shows that up to a third of the information provided is *wrong*. A good example of how de-regulation has shifted money into the private sector at the expense of service provision to the public.

There have been suggestions of having an international emergency number. At the moment it’s 999 in the UK, 911 in the states and so on. But research suggests that it would take years for a new international number to be widely recognised and accepted. So little numbers they might be, but they can have vital social meaning and changing even so many as three numerics can have enormous implications.

Although having said that, the London dialing codes changed on a regular basis for a couple of years from 01 to 0181 to 020 8 and 020 7 and everyone dealt with this (they had no choice - learn the right code or don’t talk on the telephone).

So the moral of this short tale about numerical cultural change is that some things can be changed quite easily, others can’t. I am all for change in the right place and time - but not date formats. Can these please be retained in a format that I can understand.

(aaaagh…I’ve just saved this entry and noted that the author date is…you’ve guessed it yyyy mm dd…)