Television and the global village

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 11^th 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