Marshall McLuhan: Global Village

Marshall McLuhan is perhaps most famous for his term "Global Village" and almost prophetically predicted pretty much the world we live in now, but almost 50 years ago in the 60s and 70s.

He predicted electonical items would become an extension of ourselves and our central nervous system and the world would become almost one tribal community. The instant communication through telephones bringing the world closer together and feeling and witnessing other peoples perspectives - almost through their eyes. Predicting the world wide web almost 30 years before it's creation.

Although at first pretty much shunned by scholars, in the 60s his theories came to prominence hand-in-hand with counter culture and the paranoia about social control and media.

'‘As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed at bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree’ McLuhan, 1964

"Before I consider whether any justification lies in McLuhan's view I need to distinguish between two different meanings in the metaphor of the 'village'. In one sense the village represents simply the notion of a small space in which people can communicate quickly and know of every event that takes place. As he writes: ‘“Time” has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening’ (1967: p.63). McLuhan is suggesting that through our 'extended senses' we experience events, as far away as the other side of the world, as if we were there in the same physical space. Watching the television premiere of the Gulf War and seeing the pilot's eye view of missiles reaching their targets, it would seem that McLuhan is right, but we do not experience the events around us solely through our ears and eyes. There is a large space between watching a war on the living room TV and watching a war on the living room floor. Our biological senses involve us in our situation whereas there is a sense of detachment in our 'extended senses' echoing the detachment of the afore-mentioned pilot. Through technology we bring the action closer to us, so the pilot can get a better shot, but it also enables us to stay at a safe physical distance, so our plane does not get shot down. Is there not a sense then that we are communicating through technologies that allow us to remain physically isolated?"

- Benjamin Symes - 1995



McLuhan believed technology would slowly replace printed matter and society would go from an idnvidual fragmented society towards a collective identity - A Global Village.

Though the World Wide Web was invented almost thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy, and ten years after his death, McLuhan prophesied the web technology seen today as early as 1962:

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. (1962) 

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Sources
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/bas9401.html
http://www.openculture.com/2010/04/marshall_mcluhan_the_world_is_a_global_village_.html
http://www.wnyc.org/story/145612-celebrating-marshall-mcluhans-legacy/