Of all the digital mythologies to infect and stain our collective consciousness over the past two generations, the myth of thinking globally and acting locally is surely among the most durable and insidious.

Witness the demise of local media over the past couple of decades. Centralized planning and buying by big-box media – the global advertisers and media agencies – do to local media franchises precisely what big-box retailers do to local retailers: drive down prices and steal local market share.

There was a time, just a few generations ago, when the preponderance of news was local, and the primary delivery vehicle for the news was the dinner table. Much more of the news we heard around the dinner table about family and friends and community issues was in fact actionable and readily influenced by how we responded to it. Then along came the network news on TV – right around dinner time – and local community news was suddenly replaced by national and international news delivered by white men in New York, none of whom had the slightest clue or had reason or time to care in the least about what happened to the Johnsons across the street yesterday when a storm blew off their roof and forced them to seek refuge for the night in the spare room upstairs. The news we heard on TV from the paradigms of culture in New York disenfranchised us then supplanted and replaced the local – more actionable and more empowering – news around the dinner table with news from distant places about strangers and big events that made us feel small and impotent.

Not long after the introduction of the network news on TV came the TV dinner, and the confluence of the two all but destroyed the dinner table as a functional and cultural medium – ultimately replaced by a cheap commercial slogan, a profit-driven imperative to think globally and act locally. At home the net effect was to isolate  and sequester individual family members in front of their own individual screens. Suddenly, we knew what was happening on the other side of the world, but not what was happening in our own homes and communities. Suddenly, we knew more about what was happening to our favorite reality TV celebrities than we knew about our own children.

Jeff Einstein

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