Television and the global village
Marshall
McLuhan was a famous thinker who set forth the ideas of a global village and
even predicted a transformation in society based on changes in communication
technology. He didn’t live to witness the rise of the dominance of technology
but it is in the area of new media that his ideas have experienced a robust
revival. Marshall McLuhan used the term “global village” to describe a new
collective sense of intimacy and proximity created by our electronic
communication technologies. Briefly, global village is the idea that people are
connected through a collection of things such as mass media and electronic
communications, and have become a single community. He argued that these
technologies which network the world are causing the world to contract turning
the experience of global space into something akin to the older experience of
village life – a kind of anxiety of being under constant surveillance and with
a suffocating lack of anonymity. For example, mass television ownership coupled
with satellite communication makes it possible to see different images from
different spaces almost simultaneously on the television screen. The whole
world can watch the Olympic games live or a deadly tragedy few hours after it
happened like the attack on the world trade center which happened on the 11th
of September.
McLuhan believed that
the media tend to encourage one sense over the other, for example sight over
hearing. For McLuhan, a specific medium of communication offers a person a
particular way of knowing and understanding the world heavily influenced that
mode of communication. For him, the television was a very complex medium. At
that time, he saw television as the most dominant medium and this particular
medium helped him share his ideas about the conflict of the oral and print
cultures. He described this medium as being cool and used it to contrast its
oral style with that of the hot style of a print culture. He also believed that
the television was extremely engaging which is true. For him, rather than being
simply visual, the television extended the eyes (further apart from our natural
range of vision or hearing). McLuhan therefore considered the television as a
unifying medium.
The elementary dictum of his view is that the promptness
of communication through electric media booms the speed of senses. Through television,
we can hear and see events that take place thousands of miles away in a few
minutes or in a matter of seconds. Sometimes, we are not aware of occurrences in
our family or even in our neighborhood but we are aware that the world trade
center was bombarded resulting in several deaths like I mentioned I above. I
still remember when I first watched this catastrophe. I was all over the news.
Despite being at the other end of the world, Mauritius, I could see details
such as; evacuation of the rescued workers, debris including an airplane
fragment lying on the street right before the building collapsed, dust filling
the air outside the Trinity Church making breathing barely possible. I was like
seeing chaos being personified live and direct. A few movies were even made
based on the facts that were acquired from witnesses. Based on the swiftness that
information is delivered, McLuhan argues that it is the speed of these
electronic media that allow us to react to global issues at the same speed we
would have reacted for any simple face to face communication. From his
perceptions, humans kind of forced to be aware of the global situation and take
responsibilities and ponder about the whole universe instead of focusing on
their smaller communities.
Other examples else from the news are advertisement and
movies. Advertisements being done about underdeveloped countries asking people
to help the needy by sending food, clothes or money have become very common
nowadays—the same concept is channeled all around the world in different
languages in quest for global betterment. Even movies sometimes show us the
plight of other countries, for example; “Slumdog
Millionaire” but they also help us
discover the splendor of different places; pyramids in Egypt, Champ Elysees in
Paris, Taj Mahal in India, Wall of China, the European Castles…
The invention of the television brought the world closer
together thus the word ‘global village’ because it broadcasts news from around
the world into our homes and it maintains many hours of contact with its
viewers. We can also travel any place of the world in very short period of time through movies and
even know the condition of any place of the world just by sitting at a place
with the help of television. Therefore, the television just like any other
advances made in technology such as the internet contributes to make the world
smaller; a global village. The television continues to be the
dominant medium of our era but maybe in the long run, it may lose some of its shine
because of the rising development of web-casting.
References:
Antecol, M.(1997). Understanding McLuhan:
Television and the global village. A Review of General Semantics, Winter 97/98,
Vol.54 Issue 4, pages 454-473
Fishman, D.A. (2006). Rethinking Marshall
McLuhan: Reflections on a Media Theorist. Journal of Broadcasting &
Electronic Media, Vol.50 Issue 3, pages567-574