Global Village
This idea was introduced by media analyst, Marshall McLuhan (1911- 1980) in the 1960s. McLuhan suggested that electronic media (television in particular) were turning the world into a “global village.”
For example, there are clear similarities between the world watching a football game on TV and villagers enjoying a football match at their local ground. The global village had good and bad connotations. It meant that the world could potentially share things, but it also meant that most of us were passive consumers.
The problem with McLuhan’s metaphor, then, is that there is more to village life than being a passive observer; a football crowd can interact with the players and indeed villagers may even be players themselves. The TV audience, on the other hand, for the most part is made up of isolated individuals or perhaps family units, with no means of connecting with the players or affecting the game.
The question for us here and now, then, is; has the Internet closed that gap? The online villager (let’s forget the football game analogy for a moment) can live anywhere in the world and with a personal computer, telephone line and web browser, exchange information like any villager or sport spectator. Do you think this is a good thing or could it bring about the end of face to face communication?
Discussion of these and other elements of McLuhan’s ideas can
be found at
http://www.cios.org/encyclopedia/mcluhan/index.html
McLuhan saw each medium as having its own particular qualities which affected the ways in which we perceived the contents of each, and governed not only the way we use each and what we derive from the medium, but its effect on our overall society. Thus the telephone promotes one mode of interaction (with an individual), the text of a letter another, and the text of a book yet another. The television, with its various modes of address, and mixture of sound and images (quite different from those of cinema), offered yet another way of interacting with society or groups within society. The internet causes all these modes to converge.
There are two aspects to this. One is the socio-psychological effect, which in a sense we are still grappling to understand. The other is the consequence for business and industry in a world where communications and entertainment technologies are becoming digital. What are the implications of, say, cable television companies selling Internet access and then telephone companies distributing TV programming?
Censorship
This is a range of operations, containing assumptions about acceptable activities. These assumptions can be invoked to argue for suppression or dismissal of material. They are normally attached to certain genre conventions. Hence, for example, a chat show like ‘Oprah’ can deal with stronger issues than a light entertainment programme. These assumptions are attached to the dominant values of a particular culture or national ideology. In the UK we are used to a relatively high level of censorship and regulatory control in the media. Cinemas, for example, can be closed by local authorities for going beyond the acceptable limits. Sanctions can be imposed on TV companies or newspapers. The Internet has changed all this.
Providers of media products on the Internet are not always based in the UK. Monitoring thousands of ISPs can be difficult (even pointless) for the authorities. There are software ‘nannies’ which filter out sites containing certain combinations of letter (s-e-x for example), and some argue that this will lead to more efficient young hackers.
However, just as filmmakers, TV producers and other media providers become ‘self-censoring’ in order to more easily make profits, ISPs are likely to refuse to carry content which contravenes local rules. Nevertheless it remains difficult to control access without charges. Fierce debates rage on the Internet about this subject. You are invited to discuss some of these in the Discussion Board areas. You will also find more information through Links for Comparison.