The world is getting smaller - do you know why there’s a little bird box on the bottom right of your Twitter app? Because we are the birds! The entire world inside one little box, tweeting away.
Today, the global has become the local - stuffed in our pockets is the ability to connect with any news story - so long as it has popular appeal- from anywhere on earth. I suspect many of us could recount with spectacular detail the political minutiae of the recent U.S election. And yet, we may struggle to name our local councillors.
There is no shame in this, of course. But, rather, an opportunity for reflection on the kind of democracy we want to champion.
I believe that we must not lose sight of the importance of local newspapers and journalists in maintaining the vivacious vitality of our democracy.
Democracy is not a top-down affair, but rather something that emerges from the people to enact positive change. The worrying trends we see in declining funding for local papers and the decreased readership as we transition into a new digital age means that the real losers in all of this will be our constituents.
I say this with an eye to the benefits big and social media companies undoubtedly bring to public discourse - I do not dispute the place every form of media has in our conversations.
But what national media organisations are sorely lacking is their ability to hold local decision makers to account. Take for example my local council authority, the Highland Council - they publish their annual accounts every year, outlining exactly what they have spent our tax money on.
To those who have crept the halls of the Highland Council for as long as I have, that kind of dense technical information may grasp our attention. But it is unlikely to arouse the interest of Piers Morgan. And it certainly would not fit onto a 280-character tweet.
The kind of scrutiny needed to keep local officials honest and help them refine their decision making through friendly constructive criticism is found nowhere else but in local media institutions.
Their willingness to dedicate skilled journalistic time to investigate information that would otherwise be lost or ignored– like local authority expenditure- is precisely their value to local democracy. Providing the community with a source of trusted information that can be used to scrutinise local decisions.
If we believe in a devolved and bottom-up approach to our decision making, then we must collectively mourn the decline of the local paper.
Jamie Stone MP