ABSTRACT
The ‘global village’ is one of the earliest yet most enduring phrases marking the rise of the global imaginary. Coined in the early 1960s by Marshall McLuhan, the slogan reflected the growing public awareness of a rapidly shrinking world. However, what the Canadian literature and media scholar had in mind was a far more nuanced process than the one suggested by this popular slogan. Emphasizing the expanding reach of electricity-based communication technology, McLuhan sought to capture in a memorable phrase the complex and often uneven dynamics of spatial ‘stretching’ that made geographic distance much less of an obstacle in human interaction. Observing that the ‘mechanical age’ of the Industrial Revolution was rapidly receding, he predicted that the contemporary ‘electric contraction’ of space and time would eventually make the entire globe as open to instant and direct communication as small village communities in previous centuries had been. McLuhan opened his magisterial study on the globalization of the media by driving home his thesis in dramatic fashion: ‘Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’.1 Leaving for our later discussion the question of whether the constraints of geography have indeed been overcome, McLuhan deserves much credit for recognizing already more than half a century ago the impact of globalizing modes of space and time.
