The Global Village

Marshall McLuhan

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/bas9401.html

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

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)

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


http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_mcluhan.htm


McLuhan chose the insightful phrase "global village" to highlight his observation that an electronic nervous system (the media) was rapidly integrating the planet

His insights were revolutionary at the time, and fundamentally changed how everyone has thought about media, technology, and communications ever since

McLuhan's second best known insight is summarized in the expression "the medium is the message", which means that the qualities of a medium have as much effect as the information it transmits


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization

the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us

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