In case you missed it, the world’s communication system is changing at a speed that would make Jean-Luc Picard jealous.

We are in the midst of a major media revolution, much of it propelled by the little rectangular device you probably have in your back pocket, your smartphone.

Nicco Mele, the keynote speaker at this year's Camden Conference, hammered this fact into our brains the other night. This year's three-day conference explores how this media revolution is changing the world.

An expert on the media, politics and public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, Mele said this revolution helped amplify the nasty public political discourse we see being played out on our TV sets. He reminded us that the men who founded our republic disagreed a lot. Many of them didn't even like one another. They were nasty, too.

For example, in the presidential election of 1800, which saw John Adams running against Thomas Jefferson, Mele said Adams got the president of Yale University to write a screed attacking Jefferson by alleging he was keeping a harem of female slaves in his basement. Adams also hired shills to run through towns yelling that Jefferson was dead. Jefferson had to counter by hiring men to run through towns yelling “Jefferson is alive.”

Like the rumor accusing President Obama of being a Muslim, today's canards are amplified at hyper speed by the internet.

In his address, Mele began with the history of human written communication. He started with carvings on cave walls, moved through writing on clay tablets, followed by paper and, in the 1600s, the printing press. Then came the revolution – computers.

In 1975, the top device, a Cray supercomputer, cost $10 million. Only governments, industries and universities could afford one. Futurists wondered if someday hundreds of us might be able to possess something like that.

Mele then held up his iPhone and said it had more computing power than the hyper-expensive Cray.

Along the way, the business model propelling newspapers and magazines was hammered by computer-driven economics. The newspapers and magazines delivered to your front door were funded by advertising. For example, Mele said, in Los Angeles, it used to cost about $40,000 to put a big newspaper display ad in front of 400,000 potential customers. Today, Google can deliver the same ad to the same number of potential customers for about $16.

As advertisers discovered this, newspaper ad revenues plummeted. Newspapers responded by cutting costs and laying off reporters and editors. Once robust newspapers soon became mere shadows of themselves. Many merged or, worse, locked their doors.

This decline is a problem for others, too. TV pundits, web aggregators, and bloggers get the bulk of their news stories from newspapers. Major papers, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Washington Post are doing just fine. But many local newspapers that cover our towns, cities and states are just shells of their earlier selves.

What does this mean?

Mele said that 21 states no longer have Washington correspondents watching their local senators and representatives. That means they don’t have to explain their votes to the folks who elected them. Of course, we believe they would never do anything that was improper, unethical, or fattening.

On the homefront, Mele said the lack of local news coverage affects us, too.

Bond-rating agencies routinely include the lack of local news coverage into the way they figure interest rates. If there is no news coverage of these local governments, if a reporter is not there to watch, the bond rating agencies figure something is bound to go haywire. So, they just charge a higher rate of interest to these governments.

Mele is not a fan of depending on the wealthy, like Jeff Bezos who bought the Washington Post, to prop up newspapers. The alternative, the Camden Conference keynoter said, is up to us. No outsider is going to fix this situation. It is up to us. And the solution will not be simple.

I believe one way is to support our local newspapers by doing more than just glancing at the headlines on our phones. We may have to pay for subscriptions to the print and online news outlets. It means local businesses should advertise in them, and we, the general public, should respond in kind.

Miss Manners was right when she said: “There are no free mink coats.”

Mele was clear. He believes it is vital to have local news reporters on the job.

An old editor put it this way: "If there were no traffic cops, everyone would speed.”