The Global Village (in the 21st Century)

We live in a 24/7, online, omnipresent, global network of media environments. Screens and more screens, thousands of satellites surround the planet, millions of miles of fiber optics in the metropolises, computers, TVs, Kindles, iPhones, iPods, iPads, each storing and streaming music, videos, films, websites, blogs, news, sports, opinion, art, and science—all connected via that vast network we call the Internet. And there are newspapers and books, too, like the one you are reading now. Media are vast environments, environments of consciousness and culture, organized via the technologies of a vast, global, and interplanetary network. The network is the underlying structure of media in the 21st century. Marshall McLuhan was one key thinker in the field of media studies who understood and pointed to the relevance of media technologies in our lives. Although most of his ideas come from the 1950s and 1960s, many of them couldn’t be more applicable today. For example: McLuhan essentially predicted the World Wide Web thirty years before it was invented. Moreover, he coined a term which you may have heard elsewhere before: the Global Village. The global village is what we live in today. But what did he mean exactly?