Technology and the winner-takes-all effect

I was exchanging emails with someone the other day and signed off with the sentence ‘let me know when you are next in London’ or words to that effect. It then occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea where in the world my correspondent lived. This interested me. Because it occurred to me that I could write the sentence ‘next time you are in London’ to more or less anyone in the world without it sounding ridiculous. Of how many other cities is that true? New York, certainly. But then it gets difficult. Paris or Singapore? Well, at a pinch. It wouldn’t work for Perpignan, say, or Bourton-on-the-Water.

This thought experiment helps explain why the many people (including me) who once naively assumed that the internet would make geographical location irrelevant have seen ourselves proved diametrically wrong. (In the late 1990s a shrewd friend of mine in Palo Alto even bought a secluded lakeside plot in the Rockies on the assumption that in ten years’ time he could live there more or less permanently: no such luck.)