It's strange how unevenly these things move. I remember hearing a report by an American journalist on the strange habits of the British, maybe a dozen years ago, and one of the things that struck him most forcibly was the British habit of texting rather than calling people on the phone - a practice born no doubt of a very natural horror of real-time human interaction. From this I inferred that texting was uncommon in the US, but with the advent of smartphones it seems that they have joined the Brits in prodding their phones rather than addressing them.