Are we living in McLuhan's
'Global Village?'
'Global Village?'
If a village, as defined by Dictionary.com, is “a small community or group
of houses in a rural area,” then think of McLuhan's new world as one helluva village.
By Lionel Gayle
There are widespread discussions that the world is smaller, or is dwindling in size. While some of the arguments might sound plausible, there is no known scientific reference that supports the possibility of a shrinking world. Yet, the ongoing speculation encourages us to think that, perhaps, we really aren't that isolated from one another, as people seemed to have thought as late as 25 years ago.
Back then—in the latter part of the 1980s—British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim) had been fine-tuning the mechanism of his colossal invention—the World Wide Web (WWW, or the Web, or W3). It's the fastest growing communication medium that runs on the Internet. In reality, the Web is “a virtual network of websites connected by hyperlinks,” and is the main tool people use to interact in cyberspace.
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| A partial view of the globe. |
Like the World Wide Web, the ubiquitous Internet is a free social domain. It began in the 1960s as ARPAnet, a data transfer network developed for the US Department of Defence. Before it was decommissioned in early 1990, ARPAnet was the first network to use the “protocol suite” TCP/IP. That's the set of codes for the basic language computers use to connect and communicate on the Internet.
In a Wikipedia article, however, Sir Tim's work on the Web in the 1980s, is credited for “marking the beginning of the modern Internet.”
Sir Tim invented the Web in 1989 and published his first website on August 6, 1991 at CERN, the European nuclear research facility near Geneva, at the Franco-Swiss border. Interestingly, nearly 30 years before the Web, Canadian communication theorist, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), had predicted its arrival.
Professor McLuhan, who spent his last days at the University of Toronto, had authored books such as, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. He was known to have coined the thought-inspiring phrase, “the medium is the message,” but it is his “global village” expression that still has people talking.
GLOBAL FAMILY
Twenty-five years ago, when the W3 was in its early stages, there were approximately 5.3 billion people on earth. The latest estimate says the world's population is 7.3 billion. In its 2015 Data Sheet, the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) has projected that by 2050, we will reach 9.8 billion people.
Take note that some two billion people have joined our global family in the last quarter century. Still, there is no change in the physical distance between, say, Hong Kong and Toronto, Canada. And the last time I checked, the flight distance from Kingston, Jamaica, to Heathrow, London, in the United Kingdom, remains the same—approximately 4,665 miles (7,520km).
What then could be the reason for the widely held perception that the size of the world is shrinking, or has contracted, in recent memories? Has anything really changed?
Perhaps the supernatural myth that is associated with some events during “the passage of time,” can create a sort of altered state of reality. However, even if such an anomaly were possible, hear the problem: time is a fixed entity, if we must believe some of our eminent scientists; and time has remained that way ever since it started in the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago.
In fact, British physicist Julian Barbour, author of The End of Time, says, “The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains.” And the greatest theoretical physicist, German-born Albert Einstein, once said, “... the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
EINSTEIN'S ILLUSION
I wouldn't hesitate to post a wager that Einstein would've also drawn a parallel between “time” (as a delusive entity) and “reality,” which he had described as “merely an illusion.” Now, if Barbour and Einstein are right, have some people—say millions, or even billions of us—been tricked by our own brains into confusing “reality” with “illusion,” and vice versa?
And, could such confusion incite us to down-size our 4.5-billion-year-old earth that is more than 196 million square miles big? Even if we think it could, perhaps we should revisit McLuhan's concept of the “global village,” just in case it offers some clarity into why, to some people, the world appears to be smaller or is getting smaller.
If a village, as defined by Dictionary.com, is “a small community or group of houses in a rural area,” then think of McLuhan's new world as one helluva village. Bear in mind, however, that his proposed “global village” is not created by a merger of land masses. “It's created by instant electronic information movement,” McLuhan told an audience in Sydney, Australia, in 1977. “The global village,” he elaborated, “is wide as the planet and is small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged, poking his nose in everybody else's business.”
In another instance, McLuhan told a CBC-TV program, “the world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the message all the time ...” And therein lies the essence of the “global village,” which a duo of nursing school educators once paraphrased as, “a global communication network that extends and connects people despite geographic distance.”
Put another way: In “a global village ... people are connected by easy travel, mass media and electronic communications, and [thus] have become a single community,” the website, yourdictionary.com explains.
Has the world become smaller, or is it shrinking in any shape or form? No, but with today's sophisticated communication systems and gadgets, it's uber easy to connect in an instant with almost anyone around the globe. And when you match such connectivity with the comfort and speed at which we travel by by air, land and sea, distance and time seem to collapse into an integrated entity.
So, to answer the question posed by the headline of this post: Yes, we're living in McLuhan's global village—almost.
