Global Village: ‘You push a button, and the world is yours’

A global village is a world viewed as ‘a community in which distance and isolation have been dramatically reduced by electronic media and the Internet’. Marshall Mcluhan, a Canadian communication philosopher understood that “We have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’ (Mcluhan, 1964, p. 5). It’s a concept that still exists today, and describes a community where space and time is irrelevant because people are always connected through modern versions of technology. A way to simplify this concept would be to understand the changing way individuals connect through the Internet now, compared to when this theory was originally introduced.

Marshall Mcluhan’s complex process has now transcended what it once was because of new media. Luhan (2014) states that “our new media is in a sense a new language, a new codification of experience collectively achieved by new work habits and inclusive collective awareness’. The world wide web removes the physical distance and time restrictions from communication, thereby making us all interconnected in a unified community.

Marshall Mcluhan (2014) states that ‘We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay’. To this day, the concept remains the same, but new media has broken all the barriers and allowed this concept to truly come alive in society. Having no barriers allows means there is still a lot of potential for what a global village can really do for a world where communication is as vital as ever.

In summary, in today’s society new media is what is ultimately driving society into becoming a timeless, spaceless field of technology and communication modes that bridge all gaps possible between the human species. Mcluhan may have put forward the concept, but new media and technology has truly allowed us to co-exist in the same time, absorbing the exact same information, in depth, all of the time.

References:

McLuhan, Marshall; Moos, Michel 2014, Media Research : Technology, Art and Communication, e-book, accessed 26 July 2015

McLuhan, M., Fiore, Q. and Agel, J. (2008). The medium is the massage. London: Penguin.

McLuhan, M. (n.d.). Understanding media.