The Birmingham Category Error

Yesterday I set up a new Flickr group, Birmingham Graffiti and Street Art, because, y’know, vandalism is cool as long as it’s pretty, and in the process put the standard “this is not Alabama” warning on the description. I think Birmingham is fairly unique in that it gets confused with its post-colonial namesake a fair bit, probably because the American Brum is not that large compared to New York or LA while the UK Brum is our nation’s second city (no matter what the Mancs say) so given the geo-political weighting of the mother countries they’re probably fairly equivalent. Only ours in more important. So there.

Prior to the glorious interconnected digital age in which we live residents of the two Brums rarely gave each other a second thought, but with advent of regionally-defined online social environments a spate of clumsy confusion arose with people offering their junk on Freecycle to folk on the other side of the Atlantic and getting all mixed up on Flickr. Hence the warning, which won’t do any good because no-one reads warnings, but at least it’s there.

Only… seeing it there a day later it occurred to me that I haven’t seen a Birmingham Category Error for a while now. It could be I’m just not hanging in the places where Alabamians hang (though I am fairly active on the Brum Flickr groups – a Spring meet is being planned if you’re interested) or maybe the fact that not only are they not the only Brum but that we’re the more important one has seeped into their collective consciousness? On the whole the Birmingham bits of the net haven’t been appended with “UK” so maybe this nightmare of rather insignificant proportions is over? Could this be an early indicator of the collapse of the cultural hegemony of the USA? We shall see…