Global village (term)

Global Village is a term closely associated with Marshall McLuhan,[1] popularized in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). McLuhan described how the globe has been contracted into a village by electric technology[2] and the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time.[3] In bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion, electric speed heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.[4]

Marshall McLuhan predicted the internet as an "extension of consciousness" in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man thirty years before its invention.

The next medium, whatever it is - it may be the extension of consciousness - will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.[5]

Today, the term "Global Village" is mostly used as a metaphor to describe the Internet and World Wide Web. On the Internet, physical distance is even less of a hindrance to the real-time communicative activities of people, and therefore social spheres are greatly expanded by the openness of the web and the ease at which people can search for online communities and interact with others that share the same interests and concerns. Therefore, this technology fosters the idea of a conglomerate yet unified global community.[6] Due to the enhanced speed of communication online and the ability of people to read about, spread, and react to global news very rapidly, McLuhan says this forces us to become more involved with one another from countries around the world and be more aware of our global responsibilities.[7] Similarly, web-connected computers enable people to link their web sites together. This new reality has implications for forming new sociological structures within the context of culture.

From Global Village to Global Theatre

No chapter in Understanding Media, or later books, contains the idea that the Global Village and the electronic media create unified communities. In fact, in an interview with Gerald Stearn,[8] McLuhan says that it never occurred to him that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the Global Village. McLuhan argued that the Global Village ensures maximal disagreement on all points because it creates more discontinuity and division and diversity under the increase of the village conditions. The Global Village is far more diverse.

After the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan starts to use the term Global Theater to emphasise the changeover from consumer to producer, from acquisition to involvement, from job holding to role playing, stressing that there is no more community to clothe the naked specialist.[9]

See also

Notes and references

  1. ^ Wyndham Lewis's America and Cosmic Man (1948) and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake are sometimes credited as the source of the phrase, but neither used the words "Global Village" specifically. According to McLuhan's son Eric McLuhan, his father, a Joyce scholar and a close friend of Lewis, likely discussed the concept with Lewis during their association, but there is no evidence that he got the idea or the phrasing from either; McLuhan is generally credited as having coined the term. Source: Eric McLuhan (1996). "The source of the term 'global village'". McLuhan Studies (issue 2). http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art2.htm. Retrieved 2008-12-30. 
  2. ^ McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. (Gingko Press, 1964, 2003) p6.
  3. ^ McLuhan, Marshall. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. (Oxford University Press, 1987) p254.
  4. ^ Understanding Media p6.
  5. ^ http://www.utoronto.ca/mcluhan/marshal.htm
  6. ^ http://www.cios.org/encyclopedia/mcluhan/m/m.html
  7. ^ http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/bas9401.html
  8. ^ Stearn, Gerald Emmanuel. McLuhan Hot & Cool (bear Books, 1968) p314.
  9. ^ McLuhan, Marshall and Nevitt, Barrington. From Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (Harcourt Brace, 1972) p265 and back cover .