McLuhan's Global village in today's society

Thèmes abordés

McLuhan, global village, today, extension of man, internet, electronic/electric media, tv, society, population, medium, message, communication, telephone, virtual, technology, interaction

Résumé du document

"We now live in a Global Village... a simultaneous happening" McLuhan and Fiore (1967) declared. Indeed, with the rise of electric media such as TV, radio, the telephone, and especially the Internet, it seems that people are ever more connected with each other. Herbert Marshall McLuhan popularized the expression "global village", meant to qualify the consequences of new media and technologies of information and communication, and also globalization. Electric media is an international connection, making us members of a "global village".
Even more than radio or TV, the Internet appears to provide the most convincing argument for the "global village", almost the fulfillment of McLuhan's vision. However, McLuhan's predictions on the global village have not all been met. For this reason, do we really live in a global village? How is the concept of the "global village", as defined by McLuhan, challenged in today's society?

Extraits

[...] McLuhan was not interested in content carried by a medium, but in the psychic and social effects inherent in the way it extended our senses. When an important new medium arrives, it can reshape who we are as individuals and as a society through a process of “interiorizing” of the new communication technology. The transmission medium through which the message is received exerts as much, if not more, influence on people than the content itself. The way people perceive the message is transformed by the medium that transmits it. [...]

[...] Thus the “global village” is a model far from creating greater social involvement. On the contrary, it has the potential to create a global divide between the connected and the unconnected and to isolate people from each other as solidarity vanishes and is replaced by apathy. Besides, McLuhan did not clarify economic and political issues such as the deepening gap between the poor and the wealthy. Nor did he talk about issues of capital flows, the environment, immigration or national sovereignty. [...]

[...] McLuhan defined with a surprising acuity these possibilities of electronic technologies. He made commonplace the term “surfing” referring to the speed, the irregularity, and the multidirectional movement across document resources and knowledge. This allowed him to predict the main consequence of the Internet, which is the total reorganization of society and economy around information. Also, the Internet has a potential to break down centralised power.In his article “McLuhan Meets the Larry Press argues that the Internet “facilitates decentralization of economicactivity, and allows professionalsto stay in touch afterreturning home. [...]

[...] Therefore, while it may be true that a virtual village has been created, it is far from the all- inclusive global vision that McLuhan prophesised. His idealistic community of the “global village” having a greater sense of responsibility has not fully come true and the apolitical character of McLuhan's theory has often been criticized as it leaves a lot of issues unsolved. Without the political dimension, the “global village” is an incomplete concept that is limited to the strict cultural dimension and does not specify how capital and power work in a globalized structure.For this reason, more than in a “global village” today's society is an open society organised around information. [...]

[...] There is a large difference between watching a war on TV and watching a war in the streets. Our biological senses involve us in the situation we are facing, whereas there is a sense of detachment in our “extended senses” (electric media). Through technology people bring the action closer to them, but it also enables them to stay at a safe physical distance. Individuals and events seen or related in the media become virtual, intangible. There is usually no real encounter between the players and the spectators, the viewers so that people do not feel the need, the urge to get involved and there is no risk taken as they content themselves with watching through a screen or listening through the radio. [...]