Our Global Village is truly unique in history.

The 21st century has been full of technological change, the introduction of higher bandwidth internet, Smartphone and social media all intertwined to create a culture of creators, as opposed to listeners. In the 20th century, there was a clear distinction between the creators and the viewers. The television broadcasting company, newspaper company and radio host(s) would create the content, sharing their views on whatever mater was at hand and present this content to the viewers. The viewers powerless to interact on a broad scale with the creators. Of course they could write to the company but naturally this was a private message, a restriction of the written letter as a medium. Enter the internet, and a new era for media begins in the form of social media. For content creating changed then from a single creator/source to everyone having a voice and this was enhanced by the easy nature of posting online and allowing their opinion on any matter be heard by millions of people.

This changed media extensively as it allowed anyone and everyone to discuss any topic they wish with seemingly endless people. These conversations breeched borders almost everywhere. The conversations and discussions that previously would be made by two television hosts are now being made by millions of people to an audience even larger, all able to discuss the topic at hand. A simple example of this is the video titled ‘Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message — 1977 part 1 v 3' [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw] where the two hosts converse ideas and only at the end a few questions were taken from audience members. This is an example where only a few people had the opportunity to pose any discussion points, but underneath this video on youtube there are 118 comments, many with extensive replies discussing the content provided by the video. This is a perfect example how before the advent of the internet and social media only a few could be heard by millions. Now anyone can posts a comment challenging the ideas presented by anyone else.

This level of engagement between the creators and the viewers has never been seen in history before and it is simply been allowed by people’s ability to communicate easily with one another on a massive scale. This is the way I would describe the 21st century, this is the reason the 21st century is what it is, this web of knowledge coming from millions of voices is unique to this day and age and has never been seen before by the world and this is where our current ideas of global village differ from McLuhan’s. Yes his 1970s idea of the global village is very interesting and is by no means wrong for when we stated it. But today we can truly act as a village, we can talk to everyone in the village without restraint at time we choose, this is the difference between McLuhan’s village and our own. We truly can communicate and be heard were as in the 70s, peoples abilities to be heard was hardly changed from the years before, the years of the ‘literary man’.