It’s a strange exercise to contemplate the evolution of the concept of “local.” We tend to define local based on our own experiences. Let me give you a few examples:
I live in Franklin, a city about 20 miles south of Nashville, TN. Both Franklin and Nashville are
“local” to me, as are about 15–20 other cities and towns — maybe more. I tend to define “local”
as within a 90-minute drive. That’s odd for this part of the country, but I grew up in Los Angeles, where 90 minutes was my average drive time to just about anywhere in Los Angeles County.
My grandparents lived on a 165-acre ranch in Northern California. The nearest town was about an hour away by car. To them, this was local. In fact, it was the only town within a couple of hours.
In some countries, “local” is the village you live in because your only mode of transportation is your own two feet.
In Hawaii, it’s not uncommon to commute to work using a 25-minute plane ride to another island.
In New York, some people commute to work from surrounding states using trains, while others walk a couple of blocks. The two groups view “local” differently.
Do you see the conundrum? Local is relative to our experiences and expectations. But here’s the interesting thing: it’s only more recently become a challenge to define.
Phase 1: Pre–personal transportation and technology
If you’re an historian, you’re probably going to hate me when I’m done with this article. (Sorry.) But for the sake of simplicity, I have to make certain delineations and leave out large amounts of nuance and data. These phases are by no means perfect or complete. However, I think they are helpful in promoting a common understanding.
The first understanding of “local” centered on the concept of “immediacy.” Your immediate
community. Your immediate village. Your immediate family. Your immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. “Locally grown” meant you grew it in your backyard. “Local news” meant village or town gossip. Without transportation to go beyond where your legs could take you, the world was quite small.
Local was an idea constrained by both distance and time. Even hopping on a horse or riding in a carriage didn’t do too much to change this on a global scale. While distance and time were important, the emphasis was arguably more about comfort of travel than speed of travel. Caravans of horses, people, and carriages still had to move at a walking pace. They simply provided companionship and security to those making the journey.
On the whole, most transportation improvements up until about the mid-1600s focused on the
experience or utility of traveling. One exception was maritime travel, which could oftentimes allow for more direct routes to destinations across bodies of water.
However, despite all of the improvements in travel over thousands of years, little was done to change the idea of “locality.” Why? Because transportation wasn’t really focused so much on the personal as it was on the utilitarian. Innovations were often made for military reasons. The average person didn’t really travel unless migrating.
At the end of the day, local was what was immediately accessible to you. (Somewhere, there is an historian who wants to punch me right now. Please stay with me.)
Phase 2: Introduction of personal transportation
Again, with the exception of maritime travel and (arguably) caravans, mass transportation wasn’t practical until around the mid-1600s, when Blaise Pascal (yes, the same guy who gave us the
calculator and got a programming language named after him) invented the first public bus, which was horse-drawn and included a fare system, in Paris. While it probably didn’t change the world
overnight, it planted a concept in people’s minds that would continue to grow: public transportation.
Humankind then saw the rise of steam engines in the 1700s, followed by their use for transportation in the 1800s. Steam-powered boats and locomotives allowed for expansion beyond major city centers. I love the prediction below from Oliver Evans — the man credited with perfecting the steam engine:
The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines from one city to another, almost as fast as birds can fly, 15 or 20 miles an hour.... A carriage will start from Washington in the morning, the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup in New York the same day.... Engines will drive boats 10 or 12 miles an hour, and there will be hundreds of steamers running on the Mississippi, as predicted years ago.
— Oliver Evans, 1800
Explorative travel became easier, and increasing numbers of people had access to systems that would allow them to travel back and forth more readily between remote destinations is much shorter periods of time.
I believe this is where the concept of “local” began to expand a bit. News traveled much faster (thanks in large part to the telegraph, which we’ll cover in another article). The flow of news, information, products, services, trade, and so on, all moved with increasing speed. The world was shrinking. Remote locations didn’t feel as remote.
Then, in the 1900s, the ultimate form of personal travel hit the scene: the automobile. The love affair with the car happened in large part because of the freedom it afforded the average person. Suburbs sprung up, and commuting to work became the norm. “Local” was being redefined.
Whereas local used to be constrained by both distance and time, it was now shaking free of the bonds of distance. After all, 20 minutes by foot would get you about a mile if you walked briskly. Now, by car, it could get you to work 15 miles away.
Local changed. What used to be about immediacy now became about reasonable access. Sure,
“reasonable” is relative. To those who had cars, it was reasonable to drive 30 miles. To those without cars, 30 miles was a 10- or 12- hour journey and not reasonable. However, this was really the first time the definition of “reasonable” was debatable.
Phase 3: The information “superhighway”
I really hate the term “superhighway.” It sounds so dated. However, it’s relevant to a discussion about how the concept of local has changed.
What I’m really referring to is networked technologies. The telephone made it possible to talk to someone miles away in ways that were previously impossible. Although telegraphs and handwritten letters existed, there was something about hearing someone else’s voice that changed how we
communicated. It took a bit of the sting away from distance.
Fast-forward to 1989, when a scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee invented what we now know as the World Wide Web. This technology would go on to forever change our concept of local. Let me explain.
As the Internet grew in ubiquity and we realized how easily and quickly data could be sent by the average person with a computer to someone on the other side of the world, we placed a huge
emphasis on the “remote.” Location and physicality seemed less important. We outsourced. We hired remote workers. We telecommuted.
Next, as the bandwidth of lines into homes increased, video came on the scene. We could talk “face to face” with family members in other parts of the world. Distance lost even more of its sting. Local became less important. After all, we could accomplish everything we needed to using web-based tools.
As the world shrank, we were now in a phase where time and space no longer seemed to matter. The only thing the Internet seemed incapable of was providing physical interaction. Beyond that, it seemed we no longer desired the local. We even shopped online at sites like eBay (the parent company of this site) and Amazon.
Then something happened. But you’ll have to keep reading this series to find out what it was.