The Global Village
I first heard this term back in college while reading Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan . He was the first person to popularize the concept of a global village and to consider it's social effects. His insights were revolutionary at the time, and fundamentally changed how everyone has thought about media, technology, and communication ever since. McLuhan chose the insightful phrase "global village" to highlight his observation that an electronic nervous system (the media) was rapidly integrating the planet - events in one part of the world could be experienced from other parts in real-time, which is what human experience was like when we lived in small villages. McLuhan's ideas have permeated the way we in the global village think about technology and media to such an extent that we are generally no longer aware of the revolutionary effect his concepts had when they were first introduced. McLuhan made the idea of...