Global Village

The global village is a phrase that relates directly to the work of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and in its simplest version argues that the advent of new global electronic media has made the world both a global village, where information is rapidly and almost instantaneously shared worldwide, and a place where communication between different cultures is possible on a global level never seen before. To McLuhan, the rise of new technologies such as radio, television, the communications satellite, and other forms of mass media has so radically changed the world that old metaphors no longer serve to describe the new mediated environment and indicate that we need a new metaphor to explain the current media environment.

This term’s origins trace back to McLuhan’s ...