Global Village Origin

First, it is necessary to articulate what exactly is meant by the usage of the term global village. Anecdotally speaking, the origin of the term can be traced to the 1948 book America and Cosmic Man by Canadian author and artist Wyndham Price. The term gained wider notoriety when Prices friend Marshall McLuhan used it in his 1962 work The Gutenberg Galaxy and the Making of Typographic Man. McLuhan uses the term to describe a situation where emerging technologies and methods of mass communication have been able to effectively reduce traditional impediments to human interaction, such as distance or time, allowing individuals and cultures to communicate with previously unimagined ease. So, is the world really becoming a global village where people can communicate more easily and more effectively than ever before? One point clearly supporting the argument that the world is, in fact, moving towards or has already become a global village is the explosion of the internet over the last two decades as a medium of mass communication and global connectivity. The internet as a medium of communication has so pervaded the global cultural identity that Mark Federman, Chief Strategist of the McLuhan Project in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto described it as a vehicle which has developed global culture into one that is everywhere and nowhere. Statistics on internet usage seem to support the idea that, in fact, the world is beginning to resemble the type of connected global community. The Miniwatts Marketing Group, which tracks worldwide internet usage statistics, reports that, as of January, 2007, roughly 1.093 one billion of the worlds inhabitants regularly utilized the internet.