McLuhan’s Global Village: Does it Help us or Hurt us?

The book The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan, is an unorthodox, visual collection of post-modern ideas that are examined further in his own point of view. The ideas that he divulges in seemed confusing and outlandish when he first published it in 1967, however, with being more immersed in the digital age, we find these ideas extremely accurate and important in understanding the electronic world we live in today. The title of the book is also deliberate work from McLuhan in order to express how these new forms of media make us feel. He uses the word “massage” instead of the coined expression, “the medium is the message”, to provoke conversation about the forms of media that are coming to light in today’s era.

One crucial and substantial point that was discussed towards the end of the book was the concept of a “global village”. It is clear to us now that what McLuhan was saying about the invention of the television and the effects it would have on our society were very accurate and only further proved itself with the invention of the internet. On the last page of the book, McLuhan use a quotation to describe the global village which reads, “the environment that man creates become his medium for defying his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential, thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village”(157). Through discussion in class and a deeper look into that the global village is, we understand why McLuhan chooses to use this term. Global refers to the connectiveness and how large of a scope that television allows us to reach. Village, on the other hand, refers to the intimacy of this form of media and how we can access it in the comfort of our own homes.

McLuhan is seen in a video clip describing the global village and mentions how we do not have harmony, rather, we have nosey people interested in everyone’s lives. This holds true not only in terms of television, but, as we see now, in our social media platforms. McLuhan was right over 50 years ago about how our society would react with this medium that stretches across the globe, yet, so accessible to our small communities. There is this debate that runs constant throughout the post-modern era which begs the question, are we living in extreme individualism or are we moving to a collective identity due to social media? Although we have the ability to connect with people without any space or time biases, we have become excessively reliant on these platforms for our social interactions. This has made our society more anti-social, while being social with each other on the internet. It is a hard concept to definitively have an answer to, however, there are good points to each side of the debate.

One thing that the global village help within our society is the decrease in master narratives that were once set norms of our culture. Women having little options, children’s rights, and the expectation of men have all throughly changed with the invention of technology. In the modern era, your life course was laid out for you and dependent on your gender, economic class, geographical location, and skill set. In the post-modern era, however, we have more room for growth and imagination because of the access of television, and later, the internet, we can obtain more information that sways us from feeling like we have to comply with one narrative that we were raised on. In many cases, people that were raised believing in one religion can now feel more free to decide for themselves if they want to believe it or not. This sort of freedom seems natural for people in 2018, yet, back in the early 1900’s, there was little choice on personal freedoms like this. It can even go further when we look at the many movements we saw in the 60’s like the women’s movement and the civil rights movement proving to these marginalized groups that they could be treated the same as white males in society. This narrative for women to get married and take care of children became an option in the post-modern era, rather than a set life course.

Thus, there are many pros and cons to the global village that our society has created in the post-modern era that we are still currently dealing with today. We still are studying the post-modern era because we are living in it and don’t know what is comming next in the digital age. We have more access to information and we are more connected than ever before, but the ability to become a more individualized and anti-social society is becoming more of an issue than ever before with the dependency and obsession of social media. It is becoming an option to solely connect with others online and our interpersonal skills are beginning to diminish as we see future generations grow up. I am hopeful that the innovation and modernization that the post-modern era is bringing will allow us to succeed in many more future endeavors while still heeding McLuhan’s ideas to the fullest extent.