Will the media create a global village?

Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase global village. It has stuck. I have seen network news people refer to the global village, communication scholars, futurists, newspaper headlines, all casually drop the phrase, assuming that everyone understands it. But the idea is actually more complicated than it first appears.

On the surface, the idea of a global village is appealing. It offers a utopian possibility -- that we could know and relate to everyone in the world as if they lived in a small village with us. We could plug into a global village grapevine through the mass media, and know what was going on. The Family of Humanity would be closer to recognizing itself.

The mass media, of course, are the stars in this scenario. This is one reason media professionals like the global village metaphor so much. Today's media are often accused of being invasive, predatory, violent, and depersonalizing. But these sins will be forgiven in the rosy community of the new global village.

Global village is a metaphor for an idealized future state of affairs. It is a bridge from the present into the unknown. Strictly speaking, it is a map without a territory -- yet.

The metaphor of a global village speaks to a deep need in alienated industrial-urban society. It addresses a longing for connectedness and community. It suggests that we long to return, not to the womb as some psychologies claim, but to a cozy village.

The phrase global village is used as a metaphor, but it is something else also. A global village is an oxymoron -- two words which taken separately would contradict each other. "Global" implies a planet-wide network, encompassing thousands of miles and billions of people. "Village" implies small, face-to-face communities. By fusing these opposites into a compelling image, McLuhan's phrase has a dynamism and memorability beyond that of your ordinary metaphor.

What should we call such a hybrid language-form? Perhaps it is an oxymoron used as a metaphor: an oxymetaphor.

I would like to pay attention to the oxymoronic aspects of this metaphor to point out that the global village, however appealing, is probably impossible.

We know that language abstracts certain details from experience. Media abstract even more. So when we think we are seeing"events as they happen" on television, we are actually receiving an abstract coded transmission. It isn't "living color," it's an electronic construction. It isn't a real person we are seeing, but a series of dots on a glowing screen.

The kind of knowledge we get from television is very different from that of face-to-face interaction. In real life, we can look where we want to. On television, unseen technical personnel do our looking for us. In real life, there is a totality, a gestalt, a whole situation with whole people, for us to immerse ourselves in. On television, we get small abstract images out of context. The media cannot bring us "real people," all they can offer are stereotypes.

Stereotyped knowledge of others does not lead to a personal understanding. Such knowledge can be easily manipulated by unseen hands, and complex persons and situations get presented as one-dimensional. Impersonal stereotypes only produce a sense of strangeness. The global media will just pile up more stereotypes for us to deal with. The close and meaningful contact of a small village will not happen.

I suppose in some perfect world of fully interactive broadband media networks, supplemented by frequent traveler plans, a few people might actually get to know each other through media in a meaningful way. This would take a complete reconfiguration of today's profit-oriented media systems, as well as some computer technology which hasn't arrived yet. For now, the global village is not in sight.

There is an eerie sense, however, in which the global village metaphor captures something that is happening right now. Each day, television brings us a group of people, mostly the same -- hosts, news reporters, actors and actresses. This group of people is like an electronic village, which we look in on daily.

The electronic village has its wise elders -- old newsmen sitting on discussion panels. Then there are the brash Young Turks -- lawyers, politicians, campaigners. During the day mostly we see the squabbling young people on the talk shows. We keep up with the gossip of the soap opera neighborhoods. The electronic village has something for everyone, including cartoon communities for the kids.

The electronic village does cover the world. When the inhabitants decide to talk about something anywhere in the world, we all learn about it. And when the inhabitants of the electronic village ignore something, forget it. But when a topic gets onto the agenda of the electronic village, it gets on the political agenda of the country. Deregulation. Health care reform. Welfare reform. These start as talk-show topics and interview questions, and soon migrate to Congressional bills, political campaign issues, laws and programs.

Who sets the agenda for discussion in the electronic village? Who are the tribal gods and oracles who decree that today Somalia is important and Bosnia is not? Who decides that date rape is hot, while incest is not? The inner workings of the electronic village remain inscrutable.

But I wonder what they will be talking about in the electronic village next year, or in twenty years? Will they casually be sitting around tables discussing scrapping the Social Security system, as so many "baby boomers" fear? Will the mediagenic newspeople then start reporting that advisory panels are recommending scrapping the bankrupt Social Security system, and politicians then start advocating such action? Will there be a "fight" of some sort, and voting covered live in Congress, and then we will hear the results on the evening news?

And what else will they be talking about in twenty years? Perhaps how research has shown that people with a recessive gene in spot 148 in their DNA are carriers of antisocial tendencies and should be sterilized? Or perhaps to pay off the national debt we should sell Arizona?

The electronic village is a strange confluence of entertainment and power, image and reality. It appears daily on our television screens. It would be nice to know more about it. We should focus on studying this phenomenon, not hoping for media to bring us an impossible global village sometime in the distant future.

REFERENCE

McLuhan, Marshall, and Fiore, Quentin. (1969) War and Peace in the Global Village. New York: Touchstone Books.

Dr. Raymond Gozzi, Jr., is Associate Professor in the Television-Radio Department at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York.