global village

Written by

Brian A. Cogan

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Britannica Editors

History

The global village is a phrase that is closely associated with the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. In its simplest form, the concept argues that the rise of electronic media has made the world into a kind of global village, where information is rapidly and almost instantaneously shared worldwide. It also describes a new media environment in which communication and interaction between different cultures are possible on a global scale never seen before. To McLuhan, the rise of technologies such as radio, television, communications satellites, and other forms of mass media so radically changed the world that older metaphors no longer described this new mediated environment.

The term’s origins trace back to McLuhan’s work in the early 1960s, when he first mentioned in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) that “[the] new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.” Another early iteration of this idea can be found in his best-known work, Understanding Media (1964): “As electronically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.” But to McLuhan, this was as much a statement of fact as it was a warning. According to McLuhan, the downside of this new environment is “retribalization,” leading to increasing war and other forms of conflict, along with greater chances for cross-cultural misunderstanding. What is usually missed in examinations of the global village is that McLuhan was not necessarily optimistic about it. Writing in Wired magazine in 1996, Gary Wolfe observed that McLuhan saw the global village not as a harmonious utopia but as a condition of “all-at-onceness” carrying risks of “mass terror and sudden panic.”

To McLuhan, satellites, television, and radio (although he anticipated networked computer communication, it was not integral to his original argument) undermined the dominance of print-based civilization. It was now subsumed by a new sensory orientation that shifted emphasis from the eye to the ear, echoing the oral culture of earlier tribal societies. In short, the advent of the global village had led to a profound reconfiguration of the human sensorium. McLuhan continually wrote and spoke about the idea of the global village for much of his career and at great length in War and Peace in the Global Village (1968, with Quentin Fiore). In that book, McLuhan noted that “civilization is entirely the product of phonetic literacy, and as it dissolves with the electronic revolution, we rediscover a tribal, integral awareness that manifests itself in a complete shift in our sensory lives.” Whether we are living in a small African village or in a large city such as London, we are caught up in a web of change beyond our comprehension. As McLuhan wrote, “Today, electronics and automation make mandatory that everyone adjust to the vast global environment as if it were his little hometown.”

When McLuhan wrote about the global village originally, he was arguing that we had moved both forward and backward at the same time. As McLuhan argued in Understanding Media, electronic culture forced people to live in fundamentally new ways even while continuing to think in older patterns inherited from the pre-electric age.

Although McLuhan often changed subjects abruptly and wrote in a nonlinear style in which the full meaning of his pronouncements emerged only through a broader reading of his work, his overall argument was clear. As W. Terrence Gordon and colleagues summarized in their 2007 book Everyman’s McLuhan,

Western culture, with its phonetic literacy, when transplanted to oral, nonliterate cultures, fragments their tribal organization and produces the prime example of media hybridization and its potent transforming effects. At the same time, electricity has transformed Western culture, dislocating its visual, specialist, fragmented orientation in favor of oral and tribal patterns.

When Wired magazine began publication in 1993, the masthead proclaimed McLuhan as the magazine’s “patron saint.” Wired, which embraced the computer and Internet age, had good reasons to admire McLuhan, and some of his quotes on the global village appear highly prescient of how the Internet could connect the world in positive ways. In Understanding Media, McLuhan wrote:

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Today, after a century of electronic technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological stimulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have extended our senses and nerves by the various media.

Many misunderstood McLuhan’s point, and some (including Wired magazine and a score of techno-utopians) thought that he was talking about a uniformly positive shift in human consciousness. However, McLuhan was far from optimistic about the possible implications of the global village. In a September 19, 1977, interview with Canadian journalist Mike McManus, McLuhan qualified his views on the global village, pointing out that it was not necessarily a pleasant prospect. “Village people aren’t that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.”

This interpretation has been reinforced by many scholars of McLuhan’s work. As Janine Marchessault noted in her book Marshall McLuhan (2005),

While the global village may be marked by . . . an acoustic and oral character, its simultaneous character is not. This is why the global village is not a utopian concept or ideal state for McLuhan. In other words, the global village attempts to describe rather than celebrate a new situation, a new way of being in the western world which is disincarnate and discontinuous.

Marchessault also stressed the disruptive effects of electronic speed and proximity. As she continued:

The fact that “the whole of the planet is being shrunk, or more to the point, imploding to the experience of a village where everyone knows everyone else’s business” is an effect of speed. According to McLuhan, it is the speed of electricity that breaks down the boundaries between work and home, distance and proximity, public and private, transforming the linear and homogeneous spaces of modernity, creating an image of the world that mimics the cohesiveness and experience of the village.

This may be the most important aspect of Marchessault’s argument. The key part of the global village is change: constant, persistent, and chaotic changes that cannot be predicted or controlled. Although McLuhan wrote the following sentence in 1962, it seems prescient of the realm of mass media and mass distraction emblematic of the current era. To McLuhan, “We are no longer committed to one culture—or to a single ratio among the human senses—any more than to one book or one language or to one technology.”

In the end, the global village, McLuhan’s guarded prediction about a smaller, scarier world with a new sensorium making digital life more overwhelming, continues to be debated, dismissed, or sometimes embraced. As Gary Wolfe noted, “McLuhan’s slogans, ‘The medium is the message’ and ‘the global village’ are recited like mantras in every digital atelier in the world, despite the fact that hardly anyone that quotes McLuhan reads his works.” But whether they know the source or not, the concept of the global village remains as important as ever.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.

Brian A. Cogan The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

global village

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