Marshall McLuhan: The World is a Global Village

The emer­gence of “new media” and “social media” — it has all looked fair­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary, the begin­ning of some­thing entire­ly new. But, when you step back and con­sid­er it, these inno­va­tions mark per­haps just an accel­er­a­tion of a trend that began long ago — one that Mar­shall McLuhan, the famed com­mu­ni­ca­tion the­o­rist, first out­lined in the 1960s. The vin­tage clip above gives you a feel for this, and McLuhan him­self appears at around the 2:45 minute mark. As you watch this video, you start to real­ize how pre­scient McLuhan was, and how social media is almost the log­i­cal ful­fill­ment of the trend he saw emerg­ing.

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Comments (7)
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  • A stun­ning clip. Despite the the­atri­cal pro­logue and the odd­ly child­like inter­lude on a library set where a TV per­son­al­i­ty pre­tends to open the door to the out­side world and lis­ten to its sounds, McLuhan and his inter­locu­tor sit and dis­cuss the social impact of the Inter­net and the Web with­out ever utter­ing those names. Of course, they could­n’t — by the looks of this black-and-white video they were con­vers­ing about 50 years ago. Remark­able!

  • mamakhooa seliane says:

    i need this infor­ma­tion aim work­ing at library

  • Turk­ish For­eign Min­is­ter Ahmet Davu­to­glu said before fly­ing to Wash­ing­ton for talks on Syr­ia that Turkey, which once saw Assad as an ally but now wants him out, could no longer stand by and watch. Turkey want­ed to host an inter­na­tion­al meet­ing to agree ways to end the killing and pro­vide aid, he said.

    “It is not enough being an observ­er,” he told Reuters, though Rus­sia and Chi­na have warned against “inter­fer­ence”.

  • Mark Friend says:

    I enjoyed the the­atri­cal intro­duc­tion which frames the Mar­shall McLuhan inter­view.

  • jt says:

    he’s read­ing from cue cards. very very weird

  • Runesmith says:

    His miss­es were as big as his mis­takes, and in some ways more inter­est­ing. He believed that text would become obso­lete in a “post-lit­er­ate” world of record­ed and trans­mit­ted images and sound. As it turns out, the glob­al vil­lage is almost all text-based, and like­ly to remain so.

  • Runesmith says:

    Meant, of course, “his miss­es were as big as his hits.” Oh for an edit but­ton.

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