WELCOME!

Welcome to my blog!

You will find everything you need to know about my podcast and Marshall McLuhans idea of the global village.

Read through all the posts.

I hope you enjoy

Daniela

Final Podcast

I have finally completed my podcast, and i am pleased with it.

I have included a little bit of sound at the beginning and end... It's a ringing telephone which fits in nicely with the whole idea and also some background music just to keep it upbeat a bit rather than boring the listener.

I could have made it into a vidcast, and added pictures of the relevant things however i decided to do a podcast. Maybe if i were to have to do it all again, I would choose to do a vidcast as i feel it would have been a little more interesting.

Research in to additional sounds.

I will put music on to my podcast, both at the beginning and the end of the narration.

In order to find a funky entrance and ending I have been looking at various different sites, one of which was freesound.org.

I found one sound i liked... http://www.freesound.org/people/Timbre/sounds/209522/ and i felt this could work well as it has a beat to it.

I also liked another sound however i didn't think it would fit in well with my whole theme. http://www.freesound.org/people/yewbic/sounds/40107/

I found another sound really funky, but with the whole theme of a global village i couldn't really mix it up too much.
http://www.freesound.org/people/Flick3r/sounds/48544/

I liked the whole idea of a telephone ringing and found a sound with a beat, and this could be one that i choose. http://www.freesound.org/people/Dr.%20Fab/sounds/26228/

The idea of having a dial up tone, when talking about the phone I feel would be good so i have decided to download and use this. http://www.freesound.org/people/LG/sounds/17405/

A Video on Marshall McLuhan

Here is another video which shows McLuhan talking about Global village.

Video of McLuhan Talking about Global Village.

Here is a video of Marshall McLuhan talking about the world being a Global village.

Script

Hello there! Welcome to DeeDees podcasts.

Coming up this week, everything you need to know about Marshal McLuhan’s idea of the global village.

Listen in to find out more. I’m going to be talking all about McLuhan’s idea of the global village and mixing it in with a bit of family background.

The place in which one would make or receive communications was once fixed, meaning the person was fixed to. If you were out and needed to use the phone you would have to search for a phone box and pray that the phone was actually working as well as there not being a long queue. As telephones were fixed before the 1990s and in positions where everyone could hear, in order to get privacy individuals would have to be cunning. What used to be distances that would take anything from minutes to almost months to travel between have been reduced to almost no time at all via the telephone.

The first person to popularize the concept of a global village and to consider its social effects was Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan mentions how ‘The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village’  McLuhan’s idea was that all the electronic media of his era such as the telephone and also the television were making our society more like a global village where everyone could communicate with one another. The idea of a global village is based on the effects of electronic technology, without this technology we are back in a vast global space that can be difficult to travel through. Through media such as the telephone, television and more recently the 'Internet', we are increasingly linked together across the globe and this has allowed us to connect with people at the other side of the globe as quickly as it takes us to contact those who inhabit the same physical space this is the same for people who live in a village. We can now hear and see events that take place thousands of miles away in a matter of seconds, often quicker than we hear of events in our own villages or even families, and McLuhan argues that it is the speed of these electronic media that allow us to act and react to global issues at the same speed as normal face to face verbal communication. In his book ‘Understanding Media’, McLuhan writes ‘Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’ (1964: p.3).

After the Second World War, my Grandfather left his hometown in Sicily to come and work over here in England. He couldn’t speak a word of English, but without a care in the world he decided to make one of the biggest decisions of his life. Back then in 1950s, there was no such thing as the internet where you could simply log on and talk to family and friends, there wasn’t a mobile for you to pick up the phone wherever you were and have the chance to speak to someone on the other end of the phone. Instead there were fixed phones and international calls cost a lot of money. My Granddad may have never of seen his mother and father again, his sister, cousins the people he was close to the most, or even his family that also decided to move abroad and immigrated to other countries such as Canada and France. Distance was a huge thing back then, in order to speak to his family he had to ring at times he thought a member of the family would be home and would be able to pick up the phone otherwise there wouldn’t have been any communication for months. However, myself growing up in this day and age, I cant imagine not being able to pick up the phone and talking to friends or family, a simple text message every now and then to make sure people are still alive and well. We can now keep in touch with the family in Italy, Canada and France, and this is something my Nan and Granddad can’t seem to get used to, as they never had it when they all moved away. Cameras and the Internet make it seem like you are with the person. You can now talk and see members of the family we haven’t actually met or haven’t spoken to in a long time. As McLuhan mentions, it brings everybody together and it does seem as if everyone is in the same village rather than half way across the world.

In summary, what would take a person ages to communicate, has been cut down to almost nothing. The world we live in today is completely different to that of the past. Technology has come so far, what will happen next? We’ve seen telephones, Internet and many more technologies develop, who knows what else they can invent. All in all, it has been a wonderful thing, families are able to communicate all over the globe, and messages and news can be received much faster than what they would have been received in back in the 1940s right up until the 1990s.

And there you have it, when asked about the internet, many now respond saying how it is a global village. Marshall McLuhan's message has been heard all over the world. 

Post War Emigration from Sicily

Post War Emigration

In the 1950s Italian emigration started again to some areas of Great Britain (like Manchester), even if relatively limited in number. It was made mainly of southern Italians. But in the 1960s it tapered off and practically stopped in the 1970s.

The region of the country containing the most Italian Britons is London, where over 50,000 people of Italian birth live. Then there are Manchester, where 25,000 Italians live and Bedford, where there are approximately 20,000 people of Italian origin.

Bedford has the highest concentration of Italian immigrants in the UK, withPeterborough. This is mainly as a result of labour recruitment in the 1950s by the London Brick Company in the southern Italian regions of Puglia and Campania. By 1960 approximately 7,500 Italian men were employed by London Brick in Bedford and a further 3,000 in Peterborough. In 1962 the Scalabrini Fathers, who first arrived in Peterborough in 1956, purchased an old school and converted it into a church named after the patron saint of workers San Giuseppe. By 1991 over 3,000 christenings of second-generation Italians had been carried out there.

In 2007 there were 82 Italian associations in Great Britain, most of them in the metropolitan area of London. Actually more than 350,000 are direct descendants of Italians in the United Kingdom.(Wikipedia, 2012)