What is the Global Village?

Marshall McLuhan was the first person to introduce the concept of the “Global Village” in 1964. McLuhan was a media and communication theorist.

The global village is a associated with the technology available today. The world is now seen as a community where individuals are connected through the technology around them; such as telephones, television and also computers. As well as this they all tend to depend on one another. Individuals now days cannot live without their mobile phones, or not watch television of an evening. Messages are passed on quicker via the Internet then they are in an actual village. That is fast.

'The underlying concept of McLuhan's view of electr(on)ic technology is that it has become an extension of our senses, particularly those of sight and sound. The telephone and the radio become a long distance ear as the television and computer extend the eye by projecting further than our biological range of vision and hearing. But in what way does McLuhan suggest how this has happened?

The basic precepts of his view are that the rapidity of communication through electric media echoes the speed of the senses. Through media such as the telephone, television and more recently the personal computer and the 'Internet', we are increasingly linked together across the globe and this has enabled us to connect with people at the other side of the world as quickly as it takes us to contact and converse with those who inhabit the same physical space (i.e the people that live in the same 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.

The effect of this McLuhan suggests is a new ability to experience almost instantly the effects of our actions on a global scale, just as we can supposedly do in our physical situations. Consequently he concludes we are forced to become aware of responsibility on a global level rather than concerning ourselves solely with our own smaller communities. He writes: ‘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’ (1964: p.5).' (Symes, B .1995). 

(Clement J, 2013)