ABSTRACT
Marshall McLuhan's vision of a global village – a society intimately intertwined via ubiquitous, real-time communications networks – has arrived. 1 One need not step back too far to realize that most of us are blissfully interconnected via a variety of networked technologies – email, social media, real-time streaming, the cloud, to mention only a few. Though such interconnectivity is nothing new, it is the increasing speed of contemporary communications, the capacity for realtime dialogue across the gulf of time and space, that makes McLuhan's prediction possible. There is now a growing global awareness among people throughout the world, who, in sharing their daily experiences, have come to realize that humanity is a single community, facing common challenges across a host of issues regarding business, culture, politics, and the environment.
