Elissavet Georgiadou

Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ and the Internet

Master Thesis (Master of Arts in Image Studies),

University of Kent at Canterbury,

Faculty of Humanities, 1995.

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1490.1282
ABSTRACT
My focus of attention in this thesis is the concept of the 'global village'
articulated by Marshall McLuhan and the Internet as a case study through which to
examine McLuhan's claims.
In the introduction, I discuss very briefly the movement from oral to electronic
communication, since McLuhan's notion of the 'global village' is part of his whole
argument about oral and print culture.
In the first chapter, I examine what McLuhan meant when he argued in the
1960's that a 'global village' is created by the repercussions of the new electromagnetic
discoveries. In order to do this I consider his argument as a whole, and I also examine
what the words 'global' and 'village' meant for him, taking into consideration factors
that arise from his cultural context and also the influences on his academic career.
In the second chapter, I consider whether the Internet is the 'global village' that
McLuhan argued about. To do this I try to give a full account of what the Internet is,
and what kinds of community it constructs and sustains.
 INTRODUCTION
FROM ORAL TO ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION

In any complicated society, social realities not only exist; they are
formed and interpreted. For any actual people, including the most
exposed, direct experience of the society is fragmentary and
discontinuous. To get a sense of what is happening, at any given time,
we depend on a system of extended communications. (Williams
1968a:40)

Raymond Williams defines the term communications as the "institutions and

forms in which ideas, information, and attitudes are transmitted and received.
[Communication] is the process of transmission and reception" (Williams1968b:17).
When the act of communication is not immediate it relies on systems/means
whereby information, ideas and attitudes can be stored, in an intermediate stage
between the transmission and the reception.
Communication was immediate in an oral culture, where people depended only
on the spoken word in order to communicate with others. In an oral culture memory
was dominant because it was the only 'system' where people could store information.
The memory of individuals and of communities carried knowledge
through time and space. For millennia personal memory reigned over
entertainment and information, over the perpetuation and perfection of
crafts, the practice of commerce, the conduct of professions. By
memory and in memory the fruits of education were garnered,
preserved and stored. (Boorstin 1985:480)

In an oral culture sending information over long distances depended only upon
sound or light. But the human voice, even with the aid of various attachments like
animals' horns or other such devices, carries over only one or two kilometres at the
most. Signals with fire or smoke depended upon the weather, and also were used only
as signs and 'signals' and could not convey even a very short message (see Clarke
1993:19). Therefore people tried to find a way to store what they had in their minds so
that they would not have to rely only on their memory to recall them, and also to make
communication possible over long distances without depending only on ephemeral
phenomena like sound and light.
People fulfilled these needs to a certain degree with the invention of writing.
One might imagine that people devised the first written signs in order to preserve their
traditional stories, but in reality writing was born of practical necessity. The first
 written signs were used for agricultural accounts at the end of the 4th millennium BC
in Mesopotamia (see Jean 1987:11-14). Gradually it became an alternative medium of
communication, thought, and expression. Actually, only with the Phoenician alphabet
did writing really become a flexible medium of communication.
The earliest writing consisted of pictograms, and the skill required to
draw them was limited to a small scribal or priestly class. With the
invention of the Phoenician alphabets, quickly copied and adapted by
many other societies, writing skills were acquired by nonspecialists.
Alphabets which are not based upon direct connections between sound
and sign, are less subtle than pictograms but demonstrably easier to
learn. Their coming meant that writing could become a universal and
flexible tool of government and business. (Smith 1980:4)1

Writing contributed even more to communication when papyrus replaced clay

and stone, because papyrus was much thinner and lighter than the earlier materials.
Due to these two advantages over stone and clay, it was a more convenient material for
written records, and was also much easier to carry over long distances.
Changes in human organisation and in conceptions of the social order occurred
only a long time after the invention of writing. The spoken word continued to have
more force than the written word for a long period. This happened because most
people were illiterate and also the novelty of writing was so distant from their
traditional values that it probably did not inspire any trust in them and was even
intimidating. Thus, writing was subsidiary to hearing, and people used to read aloud
the written text in order to bring its contents back to the 'oral world', which they were
more comfortable with, for themselves and for others. Also the fact that manuscripts
were scarce obliged the readers to memorise their content. But the above were valid
only for the small literate class. E.Eisenstein points out that before printing "learning
was governed by reliance on the spoken word producing a hybrid half-oral, half-literate
culture that has no precise counterpart today" (Eisenstein 1979:11). For all the others,
written manuscripts for hundred of years did not affect their lives differently from oral
information, because even when they encountered a written text they needed somebody

1
For more extensive account see Harvey J. Graff The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and contradictions in Western
culture and society. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1991. "From writing to Literacy". pp. 16-31.
 to read it out to them and probably translate from Latin, which was the formal language
of writing, as they were illiterate and/or did not know Latin2.
Therefore with writing man had a new means of storing information and ideas
but this new means was only a privilege of a small literate class and as a result all the
people outside this class could not make use of it. This of course does not mean that
writing left all these people 'untouched' because when a culture moves from oral to
textual culture then "the sole means of establishing a position's legitimacy was assumed
to be the discovery of a written precedent" (Stock 1983:8). So, even if most people in a
community were illiterate they were affected by the authority of texts and by those who
were literate.
Therefore in that era written documents did exist but they were inaccessible to
the wider public until after the middle of the 15th century when printing was invented
in the West by Johann Gutenberg. Printed texts became more widely accessible than
manuscripts for two primary reasons. First, with print texts became reproducible in
large numbers in a short amount of time in contrast to the act of duplicating
manuscripts by hand, an act which demands a lot of effort and time to complete only a
very limited number of reproductions. Secondly, print enabled literacy to spread to the
general public with editions in vernacular languages, which gradually overthrew Latin,
the international European language for the learned, but a foreign language for all
except scholars and clerics. Therefore printing decreased the time between the two
poles of communication by making texts more easily disseminable and thereby
reducing the need for travel, something that was previously necessary for anyone who
wanted to have access to any kind of information or knowledge.
But beyond this, the basic means of immediate communication -- that is,
communication without intermediary stages -- was still speech.3 Reading a text, printed
or hand-written, is not an immediate communication because the author is not

2
I am focusing on Europe and Western civilisation. For non-European perspectives see Jack Goody, The Interface
between the written and the oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987, and The domestication of the Savage
Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1977.
3
It is also noticeable that the spoken language of the elite was often different from that of the general population,
Norman French in England, Castilian in Spain etc. Until the beginning of the 16th century the national languages of
Western Europe, which had developed as written languages at different dates in different countries, had continued to
evolve, following closely the development of the spoken languages. Therefore printing helped mould our modern
European languages (Febvre and Martin 1993:319).
 physically present at the time that the text is being received, so that the reader cannot
express his/her reactions immediately to the author, that is, a dialogue is not taking
place. Therefore there is a time/space gap between the transmission of the text and its
reception.
Also the fact that animals, especially horses in the West, and the wind-driven
sailing-ship (which were the main mode of transporting texts over long distances)
remained the swiftest means of transport until the start of the 19th century, made direct
communication over distance quite impossible. In the early 19th century trains and
boats with steam-engines contributed to the speeding up of communications,
decreasing seriously the time factor. For instance, at the beginning of the 1830's
messages took up to four weeks to get from England to America by clipper sailing
ship. But at the end of the next decade, "steamers had cut the time in half" (see Gordon
1977:41). But still the problem of direct communication remained unsolved. People
had invented some ways to communicate directly over distances with the aid of sound
and light as I mentioned earlier, or even with more sophisticated devices like
semaphore4, but the limitations with such means were extremely high regarding the
range, the speed and the content. "Real telecommunication5, with virtually no
limitations on range, speed or contents [sic], was not possible until the scientists of the
early nineteenth century started to investigate the curious properties of electricity6"
(Clarke 1993:20). At the beginning of the 19th century scientists discovered that
electric impulses could be used to transmit signals along a wire.
After this observation came the rapid development of the electric telegraph and
with it a new phase in human communications. In 1840 the electric telegraph became a
commercial instrument of enormous possibilities. "Within ten years it had covered
most of Europe and the settled portions of North America -- but it still stopped at the

4
In the late 18th century optical telegraphs were invented by Claude Chappe in France and by George Murray in
England. Called semaphores, these telegraphs relayed messages from hilltop to hilltop with the aid of telescopes
(Britannica Micropaedia 1992 vol.9 p. 611).
5
The term telecommunication does not mean in its essence communication using only telephone,radio, television, et
cetera as one thinks, but is a compound word and means communication over a distance in general. The origin of the
compound form tele- is the Greek word tel_ (_) which means far.

6
Benjamin Franklin proved the electric nature of lighting in 1752 in his famous kite experiment and he established the
conventional use of negative and positive to distinguish kinds of charge. In 1881, more than a century after Franklin's
observations, electric power began to be introduced rapidly into people's lives when Thomas A. Edison constructed the
first central power station and distribution system in New York city (Britannica Micropaedia 1992 vol.4 p.430).
 edge of the sea" (ibid). This problem, 'wiring the sea', was solved only a very few
decades later. In 1858 a telegraph cable was successfully laid across the North
Atlantic, and "at the closing of a switch the gap between Europe and America dwindled
abruptly from a month to a second" (Clarke 1993:20). This particular project lasted
only for a few days as the cable broke, "but after an eight-year saga of almost
unbelievable courage and persistence, a successful Atlantic telegraph was finally laid,
[and] is one of the great engineering epics of all time, and has many lessons for us even
today" (ibid).
The first submarine cables could only transmit telegraph signals and not
speech. Transmission of speech became possible with the telephone7, Alexander
Graham Bell's invention, in 1876. But, as I have already mentioned, the first
submarine cables could not transmit speech, and therefore the telephone could not
cover trans-sea communications. Then radio was invented which could transmit
speech over the sea without relying on submarine cables, using the ionosphere, a kind
of invisible mirror around the earth which by reflecting radio waves allows speech to
travel around the curve of the globe after one or more reflections from it. The
combination of these two devices, radio and telephone, in 1927 made possible the
transmission of the human voice and other sounds through the radiotelephone across
the sea. This continued until 1956 when the first submarine telephone cable was laid
between Europe and America (see Clarke 1993:21).
The submarine cable together with later satellite8 communication technology,
provided communication as 'immediate' as in an oral culture. Today all the electronic
communication media of sound and sight depend on these two technologies in order to
provide what they promise: instant transmission and reception, in other words instant
communication.
What is the impact of this on people's lives? Arthur C.Clarke argues that our
civilization could not exist without efficient communications, because it is hard to see
how international trade or cultural exchanges could exist without them (Clarke

7
Telephone is a compound word from the Greek words tel_/_(far) and phon_/_(voice).

8
Satellite communication is the use of artificial satellites travelling in orbit to provide communication links between
various points on Earth. The first satellite communication experiment was the U.S. government's Project SCORE, which
launched a satellite on December 18, 1958 (Britannica Macropaedia 1992, vol.10, p.46).
1993:19). Further, he argues that the human race "except for a few dwindling tribes in
(alas) equally dwindling forests" has almost became a "single entity, divided by time
zones rather than the natural frontiers of geography."
The same TV news networks cover the globe; the world's markets are
linked by the most complex machine ever devised by mankind -- the
international telephone/telex/fax/data transfer system. The same
newspapers, magazines, fashions, consumer goods, automobiles, soft
drinks may be found anywhere between the North and South Poles; and
at a World Cup Final, at least 50 per cent of the males of the species
will be found sitting in front of a TV set, probably made in Japan. (ibid)
The 'single entity' that Clarke is referring to evokes Marshall McLuhan's claim that a
'global village' is created by the repercussions of the new electromagnetic discoveries.
Clarke's book, (in its Bantam edition) How the World was one, is even subtitled
Beyond the Global Village. McLuhan's claim, made in the 1960's, is often now
regarded as a successful prediction, as correctly anticipating current developments. But
is it really possible for the human race to live in a 'global village', and what is actually
meant by the 'global village'? In this thesis I will try to examine McLuhan's claim
using the Internet as a case study.
_________________________________
 CHAPTER 1
HERBERT MARSHALL McLUHAN AND THE 'GLOBAL VILLAGE'

The invention of several revolutionary means of communication and

transportation in the early 20th century generated numerous predictions and prophecies
about the future of communications and by extension the future of the globe. Some of
them appeared in science fiction stories, and others in academic literature in the form of
simple statements or in a more extended form: that of theory. I will cite some
examples (which are not of course the only ones) in order to illustrate what I mean.
In 1934 Lewis Mumford claimed that with the invention of the telegraph, a
series of inventions began to eliminate the time element between transmission and
response, regardless of the distance involved, and as a result, with the aid of
mechanical devices communications returned to the instantaneous reaction of person to
person with which it began (Mumford 1934:239). Later, in 1947 the historian Arnold
Toynbee, at a lecture he gave at London University's Senate House entitled 'The
Unification of the World' argued that "the developments in transport and
communication had created -- or would create -- a single planetary society" (quoted in
Clarke 1993:9).
But one of the most important theories was that of Herbert Marshall McLuhan.
His theory was important because he argued that the application of the new
communication media in people's lives would not only bring changes in the way people
communicate with each other, but also would bring radical changes in all human
affairs. In The Medium is the Massage he points out that:
The medium, or process, of our time -- electric technology -- is
reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and
every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and
reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution
formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing -- you, your family,
your neighbourhood, your education, your job, your government, your
relation to 'the others'. And they are changing dramatically. (McLuhan
1967:8)

One of the main points of his theory is that the "electromagnetic discoveries
have recreated the simultaneous 'field' in all human affairs so that the human family
now exists under conditions of a 'global village'" (1962:31). His argument was not so
much a prediction or a prophecy for himself because when he was writing in the early
 60's, he was absolutely convinced that the world was already transformed, with the aid
of the new electric media like radio, telephone, and television into a 'global village'. But
most of what he said is acknowledged today by many people involved in the media as
remarkable prophecies because as Lapham points out:
[m]uch of what McLuhan [said] makes a good deal more sense in 1994
than it did in 1964, and even as his book [Understanding Media] was
being remaindered to the backlist [sic], its more profound implications
were beginning to make themselves manifest on MTV and the Internet,
in Ronald Reagan's political image and the re-animation of Richard
Nixon, via television shopping networks and e-mail -- all of them
technologies that McLuhan had presupposed but didn't live to see
shaped in silicon or glass. (Lapham 1994:xi)

The famous phrase 'global village' is part of his whole argument about oral and
print culture. In order to give a context to this phrase I will try to refer to his whole
argument very briefly and without any further comments on it. I will not comment on
it because I believe that most of his claims, because they are unhistorical9, are
contradictory and one would need to gloss over a lot to comment on each one of them.
But I shall withhold comment, mainly because I want to concentrate my attention on
the phrase 'global village' and try to examine what McLuhan possibly meant by it.
McLuhan argues that man in any moment of consciousness is aware of all the
senses simultaneously. Any effort to impart this unique experience from one person to
another necessitates both distortion and simplification. Therefore when man is trying to
communicate through any medium, the possibilities of receiving and transmitting a
message with the kind of accuracy apposite, depends on the capacity of the medium to
include all the pertinent human senses. The spoken word is according to him the only
medium that can fulfil this requirement because in speech man tends to react to any
situation that occurs, and he reacts with tone, manual gestures and facial expression, in
order to emphasise or to make more clear what he means. Therefore all the senses are

9
For example, McLuhan claims that 'the hand that filled the parchment page built a city' (1967:50), but Babylon city
existed long before that. Babylon was the capital of Southern Mesopotamia from the early second millennium to the
early first millennium BC. Actually, papyrus was used as writing material long before parchment was. The oldest
papyrus found, the Persae of Timotheus, dates from the fourth millennium BC, and papyrus was the source of all writing
material until it was superseded by parchment by the third century AD (see Britannica Micropaedia vol.9 p.132, vol.1
p.770). Further, McLuhan argues that the book is "the first uniformly repeatable commodity" (1962:124), but in fact
coins were first issued in the late seventh century BC and the first book appeared in the fifteenth century AD (see
Britannica Micropaedia vol.3 p.438).
in action. Primitive man who used only the spoken language as a basic means of
communication lived in a condition of rich imaginative enchantment.
Before the invention of writing man lived in acoustic space, which "has the
basic character of a sphere whose focus or centre is simultaneously everywhere and
whose margin is nowhere" (McLuhan 1978:54). This space was 'boundless,
directionless, horizonless'. Man lived there in the "dark of the mind, in the world of
emotion, of primordial intuition, of terror" (McLuhan 1960:207).
Further he argues that writing tends to be a kind of separate or specialist action
in which there is little opportunity or call for reaction because man is forced to attend to
vision at the expense of all his other senses. Man abandons the acoustic space for the
sake of the visual space; "visual space, as elucidated in Euclidean geometry, has the
basic characters of lineality [sic], connectedness, homogeneity, and stasis. These
characteristics are not found in any of the other senses" (McLuhan 1978:54).
Writing is responsible for the formation of towns, roads, armies and
bureaucracy. "Writing was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilisation
began, the step from the dark into the light of mind. The hand that filled the parchment
page built a city" (McLuhan 1967:50). The effects of writing were magnified by print:
the mechanization of writing. "The invention of typography confirmed and extended
the new visual stress of [sic] applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly
repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass production"
(McLuhan 1962:124).
Print created the portable book and now man can read isolated from others, in
privacy. The printed book added much to the new cult of individualism (see McLuhan
1962:206). Further, print "in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed
systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism" (McLuhan
1962:199). With print the private fixed point of view became possible and literacy
conferred the power of detachment, of non-involvement; the power to act without
reacting (see McLuhan 1994:73).
It is the kind of specialization by dissociation that has created Western
power and efficiency. Without the dissociation of action from feeling
and emotion people are hampered and hesitant. Print taught man to
say: "Damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead!". (McLuhan 1994:178)
 But with the application of the new electromagnetic discoveries, which have
recreated the simultaneous field in all human affairs "our specialist and fragmented
civilization of centre-margin structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous re-
assembling of all its mechanised bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of
the global village" (McLuhan 1994:93).
We are back in acoustic space and the telephone, gramophone, and radio are
the mechanization of post-literate acoustic space. "Movies and TV complete the cycle
of mechanization of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving
eye, we have abolished writing, the specialised acoustic-visual metaphor that
established the dynamics of Western civilization" (McLuhan 1960:208). "Television
demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as
a background. It engages you. Perhaps this is why so many people feel that their
identity has been threatened" (McLuhan 1967:25).
Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness [sic]. 'Time' has ceased,
'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village....a simultaneous
happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have began again to
structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few
centuries of literacy divorced us. (McLuhan 1967:63)

How has 'time' ceased and 'space' vanished? McLuhan claims that with the
new electric media we have moved into the period of post-history because the whole
present and the entire past which are the totality of human reality in time and space are
simultaneously present (see McLuhan 1970:131).
McLuhan argues for the formation of the global village with the help of new
electronic media without concerning himself with the messages which they actually
carry. He claims that the 'medium is the message' because the medium shapes and
controls the scale and form of human association and action (see McLuhan 1994:9).
Further he argues that we no longer respond to the content of the message but the total
effect. Our basic concern with effect rather than meaning is an outcome of our electric
time. "[E]ffect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information
movement [sic]" (McLuhan 1994:26). Therefore when people are listening to the radio
they are not affected by what they hear but they are affected only by the radio itself; by
the whole process of listening to the radio. In his book The Medium is the Massage he
claims that Hollywood is often a fomenter of anti-colonial revolution.
 The motion picture industry has provided a window on the world, and
the colonized nations have looked through that window and have seen
things of which they have been deprived. It is perhaps not generally
realised that a refrigerator can be a revolutionary symbol to a people
who have no refrigerators. (McLuhan 1967:131)
McLuhan here illustrates the view that people are interested only in the effect which is
the anti-colonial revolution, and not for the message (refrigerator) that was the motive
for the effect.
***
What exactly did McLuhan mean by the phrase 'global village'? Did he use it
as a promise or as a threat? These are not easy questions to answer because of two
major obstacles. Firstly the whole of his argument is contradictory and secondly the
adjective global cannot easily modify the noun village. A village presupposes a face-to-
face community, something that is impossible on a global scale, and also a village
cannot be multicultural as the globe is.
But how do the contradictions appear in his argument? McLuhan claims:
Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never
before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as
never before -- but also involved in the total social process as never
before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system
globally, instantly interrelating every human experience. (McLuhan
1994:358)

When one reads the above one can feel the enthusiasm with which the 'global village' is
anticipated, and one can say almost with certainty that something extremely promising
is happening. The use of the word free inspires a positive association. But then, when
one reads that on the one hand writing is the step from the dark into the light of mind,
and then by abolishing it with the new electric media we are back in acoustic space
where man lived in the 'dark of the mind', in the world 'of primordial intuition and of
terror' then the argument does not appear promising any more. But again this threat
can transform into a promise if one reads further: the 20th century, the age of electric
information, instant retrieval and total involvement, is a new tribal time and what
distinguishes an oral or tribal society "is that it has the means of stability far beyond
anything possible to a visual or civilised and fragmented world" (McLuhan 1989:23).
 Elsewhere his argument becomes both a threat and a warning saying that the
new technologies of the electronic future carry us backward into the caves of a
neolithic past where people worship the objects of their own inventions.
With electric media Western man himself experiences exactly the same
inundation as the remote native. We are no more prepared to encounter
radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to
cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world
and beaches him in individual isolation. We are as numb in our new
electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical
culture. (McLuhan 1994:16)
Philip Marchand, in his biography Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the
Messenger, claims that McLuhan argues that unless people understand the nature of the
new electric media they run the risk of losing all the traditional values of literacy and
Western civilisation. "This was not, be it noted, the warning of a man besotted with the
prospect of the coming global village" (Marchand 1989:145). I believe that his claim is
not wholly correct because on the one hand it is true that McLuhan argued that the new
electric technology threatens the ancient technology of literacy built on the phonetic
alphabet, and also that our Western values built on the written word have been
seriously affected (see McLuhan 1994:82), but on the other hand he does not make
clear that he uses the term civilization in a positive sense. Actually in War and Peace
in the Global Village he points out that civilization is the 'mother of war'.
The fact is that as man has advanced in civilization he has become
increasingly, not less, violent and warlike. The violences that have
been attributed to his original nature have, in fact, been acquired
predominantly within the relatively recent period of man's cultural
evolution. In our own time most of us have grown so accustomed to
the life of each for himself that it is difficult for us to understand that for
the greater part of man's history every man of necessity lived a life of
involvement in the welfare of his fellows. If we have misinterpreted the
life of pre-historic man and his prehuman ancestors through the
distorting glass of our modern prejudices and prejudgments, there no
longer remains any reason why we should continue to do it. The
important thing for us is not to deny our prejudices and prejudgments,
but to acknowledge them, and to consider the evidence concerning the
nature of our prehuman ancestors in the light of facts. It helps to know
that civilization is entirely the product of phonetic literacy, and as it
dissolves with the electronic revolution, we rediscover a tribal, integral
awareness that manifests itself in a complete shift in our sensory lives.
(Ashley Montagu quoted in McLuhan 1989:23-24)
I include such a long quotation because I think that it was necessary to do so in order to
make clear what McLuhan thinks about civilization. Now it becomes quite clear that
he was against the civilization, which, he claims, is entirely the product of phonetic
literacy. Therefore with the above quotation Marchand's claim proves to be
unsubstantial.
It is obvious that McLuhan's argument, beyond its inconsistency, is on the
whole full of enthusiasm for the idea of the 'global village'. In Counterblast, where he
gives some of the characteristics of human relations in the 'global village', his
enthusiasm and his optimistic view are explicit and his only problem is that people
should be aware and prepared for the advent of the 'global village', otherwise they
would not get the most from it.
He wrote in Counterblast that the effect of extending the central nervous system
with the new electric media "is not to create a world-wide city of ever expanding
dimensions but rather a global village of ever-contracting size" (McLuhan 1970:40).
Information will move in the village at such speed that every human action or event
will involve everybody in the village in the consequences of every event. The new
human settlements in terms of the contracting 'global village' must consider "the new
factor of total involvement of each of us in the lives and actions of all" (McLuhan
1970:41). In the era of automation and electricity the globe becomes "a community of
continuous learning, a single campus in which everybody, irrespective of age, is
involved in learning a living" (ibid). In this 'global village' where the learning is
continuous and the participation in the human dialogue complete, "the problem of
settlement is to extend consciousness itself and to maximize the opportunity of
learning" (ibid). In contrast with the earlier mechanical age when settlement acts
without involving oneself in the life of others, and the industrial age where people act
without reacting, "the electric age is the age of Implosion [sic], of inclusive
consciousness, and deep personal involvement. The crisis in human settlement arises
from a clash between these two opposed forms of culture and technology" (ibid). With
the phrase 'a clash between these two opposed forms of culture and technology' he
means what I have already mentioned earlier: that we are not prepared to accept our
new media/our electric age because on the one hand we live mythically and integrally
as McLuhan claims, but on the other hand we continue to think in the old fragmented
space and time patterns of the pre-electric age (see McLuhan 1994: 25).
* * *
To clarify even further how McLuhan used the term 'global village', one should
also examine what the words 'global' and 'village' meant for him. In order to do so one
should take into consideration the factors that arise from his cultural context, and also
the influences of his academic career.
McLuhan was born in 1911, and brought up in the Western Provinces of
Canada, which was -- and still is -- a multicultural society. The population in the
Provinces was an English-speaking majority which consists largely of the descendants
of American loyalists, Scottish, Irish, and English settlers of the 18th and the 19th
centuries; a French speaking minority consists of the descendants of 17th century
'Acadian' [sic] settlers augmented by French Canadians from Quebec, and also the
Province's first inhabitants, the native Indians and Eskimos. In addition, increased
immigration from European countries, Southeast Asia and Latin America in the latter
part of the 20th century, has made the Provinces and in fact the whole of Canada even
more broadly multicultural (see Britannica Macropaedia 1992, Volume 15 pp.
445,490). Therefore McLuhan was born and raised in a 'microcosm' of the globe:
people from different places, with different social and cultural identities. All these
different people comprise the Canadian nation, and this was living proof to McLuhan
that a global, in the terms of multicultural, society can work.
McLuhan, due to his descent was also influenced by the ideas, which shaped
and fortified the imagination and the political initiative of the American North West
from the early years of the 19th century onwards. These ideas were closely related to
Agrarian Socialism. The immigrants of the great American prairies had the dream of
the garden Utopia "within which any man who was willing to mix his labour with the
soil could realise the invigorating ideals of sturdy yeoman independence" (see Miller
1971:23). But in the middle of the 19th century the agrarian ideal came into serious
conflict with reality, when rail roads that were controlled from New York and distant
bankers started to intervene in their own way in the production of the agricultural
goods. Thus the 19th century yeoman became dependent upon a remote economic
system over which he had no direct power (see Miller 1971:23). McLuhan was aware
of all these facts and thus he knew that the dream of his ancestors collapsed because of
the new technologies (i.e the rail road).
Miller argues that McLuhan's Agrarian distributist ideas were fortified during
his postgraduate studies in Cambridge, under the influence of the Cambridge critic
F.R.Leavis who was associated indirectly with the ideas of Agrarianism. Further,
Miller argues that McLuhan developed all these ideas "in a subtly disguised form in
such publications as The Gutenberg Galaxy, which seem on the surface to be no more
than dispassionate accounts of the effects of new technologies upon the senses of man"
(Miller 1971:25).
F.R.Leavis' ideas about village life were very indebted to George Bourne's
writings. Leavis in his book For Continuity wrote:"[...] how much richer the life was in
the old, predominantly rural order than in the modern suburban world one must go to
the now oft-cited George Bourne (under both his names) for an adequate intimation"
(Leavis 1933:217). The village life that Bourne illustrates in his writings is a life full of
purity, calmness and simplicity on the one hand; and on the other hand is the place
where people face a lot of problems because of their own folly, such as drunkenness,
and because of their economic condition which is mostly a consequence of their
dependency on the city economy (see Bourne 1966:1-12). The enthusiasm with which
McLuhan writes about the global village makes me believe that the negative side of
village life is of no interest to him. His image of the village is one of simplicity,
calmness, and purity; where people are deeply involved in the lives of other people
because of common aims, where people really care for each other (within the
framework of kinship), where information is common and always accessible for
everyone: common language, common heroes, common knowledge. Even when one is
not well-informed for a particular reason, one could become informed in a minute if
one wanted to, by the simple act of opening his/her door and asking his/her neighbour
what is happening in the village.
In the village, time and space acquire their meaning only when they refer to
cultivation: 'March is the best month to plant potatoes', or 'never take the cows out of
the fold at noon'.
Where the moon's changes were discussed so solemnly, and people
numbered the 'mistis in March' in expectation of corresponding 'frostis
in May'; where if a pig fell sick, public opinion counselled killing it
 betimes, lest it should die and be considered unfit for food; where the
most time-honoured saying was counted the best wit, so that you raised
a friendly smile by murmuring 'Good for young ducks' when it rained;
where the names of famous sorts of potatoes -- red-nosed kidneys,
magnum bonums, and so on -- were better known than the names of
politicians or of newspapers. (Bourne 1966:5)

Hence I believe that the kind of village that McLuhan was inspired by, is a self-
sufficient community based on a rural economy. All those simple virtues I have
referred to above are valid only for such communities where people's interests are only
within the village. There is no outside for them any more. People are not concerned
about what is happening or who controls things outside their village, therefore they are
more interested in the names of vegetables than in politicians' names.
But McLuhan was also fascinated by tribal society and a live example of this
kind of society was in fact very close to him: Inuit's (Eskimo) society, a part of North
America's native inhabitants. Therefore, for McLuhan the world is becoming a village
with the kinship patterns and interdependence that characterized the primitive tribal
village.
[The] visual, specialist, and fragmented Westerner have now to live in
closest daily association with all the ancient oral cultures of the Earth,
but [also] his own electric technology now begins to translate the visual
or eye man back into the tribal and the oral pattern with its seamless
web of kinship and interdependence. (McLuhan 1994:50)
Brotherhood is one of the major characteristics in the 'global village'. This
brotherhood, which is being forced on people by the electric technology, alters the
position of the 'Negro' [sic], the teen-ager, the woman, the cripple and other groups.
"They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They
are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media" (McLuhan
1994:5).
Hence, more or less, the above sketches out the kind of 'global village'
McLuhan dreamed about: a place where there is no room for the civilization, which is
the product of phonetic literacy. I think that the aim of this kind of society is well
expressed by Schrieke. Schrieke argues that the old society's aim was to leave matters
as previous generations formed them.
The head-man (note: this term refers to the head of the village) was
expected to maintain the customary law and everybody was willing to
help him to that end. For this reason society bore a predominatingly
 [sic] static character. Nobody thought of the advancement of the
community, for nobody aspired to 'progress'. There was no competition,
no stimulus to improvement, no desire for a better and more
comfortable existence. Instead of working for profit and advancement,
men preferred to tread in the path of their fathers, which was hallowed
by 'religion'. (quoted in Breman 1980:7)
The difference is that there is no head-man in McLuhan's 'global village'; all the
inhabitants are equal and they live under conditions of complete democracy (see page
15-16).
McLuhan's argument remains quite popular today because people feel
estranged in the modern world and the idea of village life is very appealing to them.
The modern city is a place where there is noise, stress, pollution, and on top of all these
things: estrangement. In the past people left their villages to go to the cities because of
the opportunities cities provide: jobs, education, and entertainment. Now we can see a
reverse phenomenon: people want to return back to the 'village': to the simple forms of
life. This does not mean that they decide to leave their life in the city and become
farmers; actually very few people do this. Most people still regard the city as the place
for all kinds of opportunities. In fact they are looking for a place where they can enjoy
the village life without depriving themselves of the 'goods' of a life in the city. In order
to do so some people buy a country-house to enjoy 'village life' during the weekends,
or some others work in the city and live in a village close to the city.
'Global village' became even more popular when satellite television and
computer networks became familiar phenomena in people's lives. The phrase 'global
village' is connected today with the new transformation of the information technologies
due to the digital computer; the information era. The phrase 'global village' is to be
found in hundreds of contemporary texts whether relating to information technology or
not. For example Builder argues that because information is being communicated
instantaneously, shrinking the globe in time, all kinds of transactions become more like
those we identify within a village rather than those of the vast world we have known
until now. People can interact with others instantly, as in a village. "Things that were
once purchased only in the village market can now be purchased anywhere in the
world, instantly. Things that we could only see if they occurred in our village can now
be brought into our home, before our eyes instantly. That makes the globe in effect our
village" (Builder 1993:161). Also, in an article about British identity in The
Independent, (26th of March 1995), Dowen and Castle write: "Heathrow is the busiest
international airport in the world. The lanes of the global village, political,
commercial, social, artistic, medical and many others pass through London".
But how viable is McLuhan's argument today? Is the new information
technology capable of creating a complete democracy, as has been claimed?
Furthermore, is it true that the electronic network re-tribalised man and placed him in
the 'global village'? In the following chapter, I will use the Internet as a case study in
order to find out if the new information technology can indeed transform the world into
a 'global village'. McLuhan would not be very pleased with my choice, because the
Internet, at present, is based more on texts than on images and sound, and he argues
that the phonetic alphabet brought about civilization, which is the 'mother of war'.
Nevertheless, I am choosing the Internet as a case study because it is the most
interesting development in communication technology since 1960s. Also the Internet is
a medium where 'every one is a broadcaster and everyone is the audience' as Internet's
users claim, and this image is better suited to the 'involvement' in the 'global village'
that McLuhan talks about.
________________________________________
 CHAPTER 2
THE INTERNET AS THE 'GLOBAL VILLAGE'
As we near the end of the second millennium AD, the leading powers of the
Western World have started to chart the future of the globe. They have pinned their
hopes for a better future on electronic networks10, wired and wireless, which are going
to connect all the homes on the planet with endless sources of information,
communication, education, and entertainment. The Vice President of the United States,
Al Gore, who coined the term 'information superhighway' seventeen years ago, has
proposed and strongly encouraged alongside the National Information Infrastructure
(NII), the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) that will connect the citizens of
sovereign nations around the world through an enormous network of networks.
On the 21st of March 1994, at a conference of International
Telecommunication Union (ITU)11, which took place in Argentina, he pointed out:
I am very proud to have the opportunity to address the first
development conference of the ITU because President Clinton and I
believe that an essential prerequisite to sustainable development, for all
members of the human family, is the creation of a network of networks.
To accomplish this purpose, legislators, regulators and business people
must do this: build and operate a Global Information Infrastructure.
The GII will circle the globe with information superhighways on which
all people can travel. These highways -- or, more accurately, networks
of distributed intelligence -- will allow us to share information, to
connect and to communicate as a global community. From these
connections we will derive robust and sustainable economic progress,
strong democracies, better solution to global and local environmental
challenges, improved health care, and -- ultimately -- a greater sense of
a shared stewardship of our small planet. [....] In a sense the GII will be
the metaphor of democracy. [....] Let us build a global community in
which the people of neighbouring countries view each other not as
potential enemies, but as potential partners, as members of the same
family in the vast, increasingly interconnected human family.
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/White_House/EOP/OVP/html/GORE_
Home.html)
Also the political context of the European Union's vision for the 21st century is
the global information society as it is formulated in the INFO2000

10
The term network according to Kevin Kelly is the least structured organisation that can be said to have any structure
at all. "It is capable of infinite rearrangements, and of growing in any direction without altering the basic shape of the
thing, which is really no outward shape at all" (Kelly 1994:43).
11
The ITU was established in 1865 for the purpose of fostering an internationally compatible system of telegraphy.
 PROGRAMME COMMUNICATION (see http://webmaster@echo.lu,EU home page,
and also Europe and the GII http://www.earn.net/EC/bangemann.html).
Parallel with these announcements a full range of computer literate people such
as academics, scientists, hackers, and students were actually building an 'accidental'
information superhighway, as a survey in The Economist named it. The article states
that: "while the giants have just been talking about the information superhighway, the
ants have actually been building one: the Internet" (The Economist 1995c:1). "The day
when every home is on-line may never dawn, but part of the superhighway is already
open for traffic. The Internet has moved remarkably rapidly from being a toy for
boffins and computer freaks to being a major force in information gathering and
dissemination" (Harisson 1994:3).
But what is the Internet? Can it be seen as the 'global village' McLuhan
envisages?. The Internet is a new space that exists only through computer networked
technology, a cyberspace12, where people can do almost everything they usually do in
their everyday life, in a new digital way. What one needs to be connected to the
Internet is a personal computer with communications software, a modem13, a
subscription to an Internet service provider, and of course a telephone line and
electricity supply. If one fulfils all these necessary requirements, then the service
providers give the potential user a new name/address. For example mine is
eg11@ukc.ac.uk; the 'eg' are my initials, the number '11' means that I am the eleventh
person with such initials in this university (which in my case is the service provider),
'ukc' is the university, 'ac' stands for academic community and finally 'uk' means United
Kingdom. Therefore some information is embodied in this new 'name/address' but also

12
The term cyberspace first appears in William Gibson's science fiction novel Neuromancer in 1984. In this book
Gibson describes the cyberspace as a 'consensual hallucination', suggesting the point at which media flow together and
surround us. It is the ultimate extension of the exclusion of daily life. With cyberspace one can literally wrap oneself in
media and not have to see what's really going on around him/her (see Woolley 1993:122). Also cyberspace is a
compound word and the origin of the first term cyber- comes from the Greek word kybernetes (__) which
means pilot. According to Timothy Leary this Greek word when translated to Latin, comes out as gubernetes". The
basic verb gubernare means to control the actions or behaviour, to direct, to exercise sovereign authority, to regulate, to
keep under, to restrain, to steer. This Roman concept is obviously very different from the Hellenic notion of 'pilot'
[making their own navigational decisions]... the meaning of 'cyber' has been corrupted. The Greek word 'pilot' becomes
'governor' or 'director'; the term 'to steer' becomes 'to control'... The terms 'cybernetic person' or 'cybernaut' return us back
to the original meaning of 'pilot' and puts the self-reliant person back to the loop." (Leary 1994:62). Note: a 'cybernaut' or
'cybernetic person', according to Leary again, is one who pilots his/her own life (see Leary 1994:62).
13
Modem is a device that converts computer readable information into audible ones that can travel over the same
telephone wires that carry human voice; another modem at the other end decodes the audible information into computer
readable bits and bytes (see Rheingold 1994:8-9).
 there are ways to discover the real identity of the person behind the name/address
unless the person routes his/her correspondence through an 'anonymous remailer'14 and
then there is no way to reveal who is behind that 'name/address'. But once one has this
address, space and time are shifted. Whosoever sends a message to that address has no
idea where either the address or the person might be. Therefore one can live and work
at one or many locations.
Once one is connected to the Internet the whole 'navigation' is at present
absolutely free of cost -- except for the subscription fee to the service provider -- but
perhaps this will change soon. Today, in the Internet people from all over the world
can communicate with each other at a fraction of the cost of phone calls or even air
mail, they can discuss virtually every subject of interest via electronic mail, electronic
bulletin boards, on-line conferences and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) which means real-
time conversations and communications on-line. They can access hundreds of
information databases and libraries worldwide and retrieve any of thousands of
documents, journals, books, and computer programs. In addition they can also stay up
to date with wire-service news and sports, and government weather reports (see
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/VUCC/Docs/Misc/ bdgtti/bgd_toc.html#S). Moreover,
people can make art, and also they have the opportunity to build new kinds of
communities, virtual ones where they can participate with others around the world and
have the chance to talk, to exchange ideas and feelings, to get married, to create objects
in their virtual environment and even to die. Also, because the modern world produces
feelings of isolation and despair people turn to the Internet for anonymous discussions
on newsgroups and confidential counselling through e-mail (see on the Internet
alt.support. depression). In short, people use the Internet to become informed,
educated, entertained, and also as a virtual world where they can create a new
'everyday life'.
But why do people put data on the Internet?
Some of them do it because the Internet has the remarkable power to
make an ordinary person an on-line celebrity; it bypasses distribution
channels and public-relations machines. Others do it because they see a
new world emerging on the Internet, and want to contribute to it. Still
14
An anonymous remailer offers an alternative way of separating one's message from one's identity. It is a server
which receives electronic messages on the Internet and passes them on, removing the identifying information. One of
them is based in Helsinki, its operator is Julf Helsingius and its address is anon.penet.fi.
 others do it simply because the Internet is there, and nothing stops them.
If the site is interesting enough, it might be visited by hundreds of
thousands of people a day. (The Economist 1995c:10)
Anyone with a connection to the Internet can put any kind of information on to
it, from astrophysics to a recipe for a fruitcake, and until recently even hard
pornography. People use the Internet as a very open public space where individuals
can get their voice onto and express their views. Till very recently people lacked such
a place because of the centralization of the top-down media like broadcasting channels
and newspapers. Therefore the Internet with its bulletin boards fulfils a very important
role in allowing the expression of difficult and dangerous thoughts and providing for
people a space to communicate directly with each other without intervention by any
authority. Geoff Mulgan argues that "[the Internet] is very liberated in some ways but
it is going to be very threatening because it is also used for very racist ideas, very
misogynist ideas; very unpleasant dark sides of people's personalities will be brought
up by a more open communication structure" (BBC 2, 'Late show: Politics on the
Internet' 10-5-1995).
But if the information is text, it is mostly written in the English language. The
Internet's main language inevitably is English because it was born and raised in
English-speaking America.
At the beginning of this year America still had twice as many users as
the rest of the world put together, although other countries are slowly
catching up. Most of the Internet's key resources -- not only software
but things like directories and information libraries -- are in English.
And e-mail, newsgroups, and other text areas are generally limited to
roman characters, forcing more of the world to use fiendishly
complicated phonetic versions of their language. (The Economist
1995c:20)
I have mentioned earlier about pornography in the Internet. Actually,
Penthouse magazine claimed the record for the Internet's most visited 'site'. But
recently a bill from America's Senate makes it a crime to send 'indecent' material on
line; the same also happened in other countries where the Internet exists. In the U.K it
is already policing by the Police Force which is mostly concerned about child
pornography (see Richard Vadon 1995:26). The question is whether existing laws can
govern the Internet adequately. Whether a place on the Internet is physically located in
Atlanta or Amsterdam matters little to a cybernaut, who can 'visit' either with a click of
 the mouse. What is legal in Amsterdam may not be legal in Atlanta (see The
Economist 1995b:16). Also the fact that the Internet's whole structure is decentralised
and anarchic because there is no single authority that governs it (as we will see later),
does not help the censors. But of course 'indecent' materials are not only pornography.
'Indecent' are also material of anti-social purposes like neo-nazi propaganda, racism
and terrorism. Howard Rheingold believes that censorship is not going to keep
'indecent' material out of our sight and the only thing that we can do to protect young
people from this kind of material is by teaching them how to make decisions for
themselves, based on their own moral intuitions (see Rheingold 1994:84).
Despite all the above description if one wants a proper definition of the Internet
one should search for one in the Internet itself. The User Services Working Group of
the Engineering Task Force (IETF) claim that there is no agreed upon answer that can
illustrate what the Internet is, but it can be seen as:
-- a computer network of networks based on the TCP/IP protocols which also has
connections with networks and services that are based on other protocols.

-- a community of people who use and develop those networks.

-- a collection of resources that can be reached from those networks.15

(see fttp://ds.internic.net/ietf-description.txt)
Also, it is quite interesting how people from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
deal with the definition of the Internet in The Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet.
Mitchell Kapor, a co-founder of the EFF, quotes the Buddha in the foreword of this
guide:
As a net is made up of a series of ties, so everything in this world is
connected by a series of ties. If anyone thinks that the mesh of the net
is an independent, isolated thing, he is mistaken. It is called a net
because it is made up of a series of interconnected meshes, and each
mesh has its place and responsibility in relation to other meshes.

Buddha
And further, Adam Gaffin in the preface to the same guide coincides the Internet with
the 'global village', without mentioning McLuhan at all (see http://www.
vanderbilt.edu/VUCC/Docs/Misc/bdgtti/bgd_toc.html#S).

15
The IETF used Ed Krol's 1992 book The Whole Internet Users Guide and Catalogue to provide the definition and
other information about the Internet.
 The Internet emerged in the early 1970's as a product of research which aimed
to connect a U.S. Defence Department network called the ARPANET16 and various
other radio and satellite networks. The objective was to develop communication
protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently
across multiple, linked, packet networks. This was called the Internetting project and
the system of networks that emerged from the research was known as the Internet. The
system of protocols which was developed over the course of this research effort
became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite, after the two initial protocols developed:
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP). From the first day of
Internet's 'birth' till today a lot of institutions, foundations, private firms, and
individuals with their facilities have provided connectivity to millions of computers on
a large number of networks. One could say that the NSF's (National Science
Foundation) benefaction was one of the most important because with its networking
effort in the late 80's Internet access became available to everyone, not only to
computer scientists and the government as it was before.17 Therefore NSF contributed
a lot to the increase in the Internet's 'population'.
Another factor, which contributed even further to this growth, was the
invention of the World Wide Web, the multimedia side of the Internet. The term
multimedia covers the combination of a diversity of technologies such as sound, video,
graphics, animation and text. The WWW allows the network navigators to explore the
Internet in a new fascinating, simple, and interactive way. The WWW utilises software
that brings together all the varied information that can be found on the Internet and
makes it accessible to the user in a simple way by utilising links written into documents
with HyperText Markup Language (HTML), to enable one piece of information to be
connected to another, no matter where each may be stored on the Internet (see Winder

16
The ARPANET (ARPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency of Pentagon) was an experimental network
designed to support military research about how to build networks that could withstand partial outages, like bomb attacks,
and still function.
17
In the late 80's the NSF created five supercomputer centres. Up to this point, the world's fastest computers had only
been available to weapons developers and a few researchers from very large corporation. By creating supercomputer
centres, the NSF was making these resources available for any scholarly research (see http://ds.internic.net/ietf-
description.text).
 1995:34).18 Thanks to this 'extra aid', by the simple act of clicking the mouse on an
active point/link on one of the Internet's pages, users can 'travel' instantly from the one
document to another, contrary to the old days of navigating when users used to follow a
much more complicated path with a series of commands in order to achieve the same
result. With the WWW the Internet's popularity increased dramatically because the
navigation became easier and also because of certain advantages of this new
technology. For instance some computer networks such as SuperJanet can be used to
transmit voice and video in real time, making multimedia conferencing on the Internet
possible.19
Since the introduction of the WWW new elements have appeared which
contribute to the ever increasing growth of the Internet. One is the development of the
Virtual Reality Markup (or Modelling) Language known as VRML20. VRML as its
creator Mark Pesce defines it is "a language for describing multi-user interactive
simulations -- virtual worlds networked via the global Internet and hyperlinked with the
World Wide Web" (http://www.oki.com/vrml/VRML_FAQ.
html). VRML could make navigating through on-line museums, libraries
marketplaces and every other space as common as interacting with textual information
is on the WWW (see John Vacca 1995:28).
But it not only gives the ability to explore 3D virtual spaces, but also the
objects in these spaces are 'hot', meaning that when one 'touches' them then one can go
to another Web site or other VRML spaces. Therefore the WWW is no longer flat (see

18
Behind the reality of the World Wide Web are the ideas of Ted Nelson which were first developed in the 1960's.
Ted Nelson was a student at Harvard University in the United States when he imagined a future when one could get any
type of information, images, sound, text, films all by selecting the appropriate icon within an on-screen document. He
managed to develop a method of linking only text within a document to other references and not all the other media.
Almost thirty years later, in 1989 Tim Berners Lee proposed the WWW hypermedia project as a way of communicating
ideas between high energy physicists at the European Laboratory for Particle Research in Switzerland. But it did not
become widely accessible to those outside the scientific and academic communities until the creation of the Mosaic
graphical interface in 1993 (see Winder 1995:34).
19
For further information about multimedia conferencing see "Multimedia Conferencing over the Internet: The MICE
Project", by Martina Angela Sasse and Roy Bennett, in Library & Information Briefings, Issue 58, March 1995.
20
One of the first signs of some kind of desktop virtual reality, came from Apple and it is called Quick Time VR or
navigatable movie. The idea is to use an ordinary desk top computer to explore a 3D world. The principle of the Quick
Time VR is simple. Its software stitches together a series of snapshots of a place or a thing which have been taken from
different angles, to create a 3D representation which can be examined from different points of view. The result certainly
is not virtual reality, but actual reality presented in a new form. One does not need to wear a headset to experience it, but
it is virtual in a sense that one can use it to explore places and things that are not physically in front of him/her (see
Benjamin Woolley 10-6-1995, 'The Net', BBC 2).
B.Woolley 10-6-1995, 'The Net', BBC 2). VRML today does not provide interactivity
with the 3D objects. For example, one can walk around in a virtual space, let us say in
a furnished room, but one cannot move the furniture. Pesce and others say that a future
version of VRML will add that interactivity along with support for letting multiple
people interact with each other in a virtual world (see Vacca 1995:28).
There is also a 'special' virtual 3D world that will run over the Internet from the
1st of September 1995. It is called Technosphere and it is an interactive computer-
based 'virtual world' whose landscape and artificial life-forms evolve over time and
depend on the relationship between dynamic systems and fractal objects. It is an
experiment on a global scale, a chance to develop complex artificial life on digital
networks. If one designs a creature then it will communicate with him/her by sending
e-mail messages, 3D pictures and quick time movies to show its latest appearance and
location in the virtual world. Therefore, one can create even artificial life on the
Internet with the aid of virtual reality's technology (see http://www.lond-
inst.ac.uk/ts_html.text/team.html).
The other element, which is going to contribute to the growth of Internet even
further, is its commercial development. Up to April 1995 selling and advertising things
on the Internet was effectively discouraged, because the Internet was largely financed
by the American government, which did not allow commercial use of any kind. In
April 1995 the government transferred its last big link (a fibre-optic 'backbone' that
carries some Internet traffic across the United States) to the companies that have been
running it under contract, thereby completing the Internet's privatisation and removing
the final barriers to commercial use (see The Economist 1994:79-80). This transition
from a government-funded to private-funded backbone is part of the American
National Information Infrastructure (see Cottrill 1995:24).
Internet's commercial potential perhaps will not allow it to have the same fate
as the Citizens Band (CB) radio. CB radio in the early 1970's was considered a
revolutionary communication means and millions of people joined it to communicate
and share information. CB radio allows many people to communicate with speech at
the same time through radio channels. But by 1980 it was almost 'dead'. It had
collapsed under the weight of its own popularity, its channels drowned under a sea of
noise and chaos (see The Economist 1995c:25). Commercial potential of the Internet
 leads to capital investment, which in its turn can provide all the necessary services for
security and reliability of the system.
I have given some reasons why the Internet is becoming bigger and bigger but I
have not actually said yet how big it is. In late 1994 it was credibly reported to reach
some 170,000 sites, 50,000 networks, and over 2,500,000 computers in over one
hundred countries and to be growing by about ten percent per month.21 From the
numbers of the computers it is estimated that there are 25-30,000,000 users. About
two-thirds of machines connected are in the United States and a quarter in Western
Europe, Canada, Australia, Germany and Japan. Over a hundred countries have some
form of Internet link, but Africa is as yet almost blank, Eastern Europe and South
America are sketchy and there are large gaps in Asia (see Harisson 1994:4).
In both Eastern Europe and the third world, a state of the art phone
system is nonexistent. Even in major cities, connections are limited to
the speeds available to the average home anywhere in the U.S., 9,600
bits/second. Typically, even if one of these countries is 'on the Internet',
only a few sites are accessible. Usually, this is a major technical
University for the country. However as phone systems improve, you
can expect this to change too; more and more, you'll see smaller sites
(even individual home systems) connecting to the Internet22. (see
fttp://ds.internic.net/ietf-description.txt)
After Internet's commercial development it is quite difficult for one to answer
questions such as 'what comprises the Internet', or 'who governs it'. One could say,
without using complicated acronyms, that what comprises the Internet is thousands of
computers around the world that communicate with each other over a complicated
network of cables, fiberoptic filaments and satellite links. Regarding the second
question, 'nobody and everybody' governs the Internet. There is no central authority.
Krol argues that in many ways the Internet is like a church.
It has its council of elders, every member has an opinion about how
things should work, and you can either take part or not. It's your
choice. The Internet has no president, Chief operating officer, or Pope.
The constituent networks may have presidents but that's a different

21
In 1972 the Internet had about 40 computers, 1,000 in 1984, 100,000 in 1989, 1,000,000 in 1992. Transmission
speeds were 9,6 kilobits per second in 1972; they are now 34 megabits per second with plans for 155 megabits per second
and later 622 megabits per second, with research under way on 2,5 gigabits per second (Harrison 1994:3).
22
Satellite television dishes can be an extra aid to the distribution of the Internet in countries where Internet does not
really exist, but the problem is that there is no way of sending a signal back to the satellite and therefore the Internet in
such a situation is nothing more than a huge updated CD ROM (see Azeem Azhar 1995:23).
 issue; there is no single authority figure for the Internet as a whole. (see
http://ds.internic.net/ietf-description.text)

Nicholas Negroponte, the director of Media Lab in Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT), argues that the Internet is interesting not only as a massive and
pervasive global network, but also as an example of something that has evolved "with
no apparent designer in charge, keeping its shape very much like the formation of a
flock of ducks. Nobody is the boss, and all the pieces are so far scaling admirably"
(Negroponte 1994:181). Also, in BBC 2's 'Late Show' in 10-5-1995, Negroponte used
another one very good example to illustrate the same issue. He pointed out that in our
everyday life we are so accustomed to a 'guiding body' that everything we think about
life and governments and even music has a conductor. But now we are confronting the
phenomenon called the Internet where there is no such conductor. "There is no head of
the Internet organisation. There is no company called the Internet. There is no
presiding authority, it is just growing". Everyone on the Internet is audience,
performer, and scriptwriter along with one's companions, in an ongoing improvisation,
as Rheingold claims (see Rheingold 1993:2). Further Pierre Lévy, the French
philosopher who claims to be a philosopher of cyberculture points out:
In cyberspace we are both watcher and watched, continually shifting
roles in a moving drama, the result of which form the collective self-
knowledge of the community concerned. There is no centre from
which to be or see the Big Brother. In fact I suggest that we start
shifting the centre of attention from 'democracy', rule by the people, to
what we call 'demodynamics', power by the people. Instead of thinking
of democracy as a complex process by which representatives are
elected to rule, we must incorporate into our communicative life the
huge potential for real-time consultation and debate. It is essential that
we start exploring this positive option soon; if we don't, our worst
dreams about misuse will inevitably translate into reality. Fast.
(WIRED 1995b:73)
Rheingold also argues about the same issue that, whoever gains the political
edge of the telecommunications technology, will be able to use the technology to
consolidate power. Promoters of the Internet, including himself, believe that the
Utopian vision of the electronic agora, an 'Athens without slaves', is possible by
telecommunication and cheap computers, and could be implemented through
decentralised networks like the Internet, because individuals can have some of the
same media powers that the political 'big boys' wield. He believes that this technology,
if properly understood and defended by enough citizens, does have democratizing
potential in the way that alphabets and printing presses had (see Rheingold 1993:278-
279). Mitchell Kapor also claims that the Internet is an example of a new category of
digital media which, by virtue of their design and the enabling technology upon which
they ride, are fundamentally different from the still dominant mass media of television,
radio, newspapers and magazines. "Digital communication media are inherently
capable of being more interactive, more participatory, more egalitarian, more
decentralized, and less hierarchical. As such, the types of social relations and
communities, which can be built on these media, share these characteristics (see
http://www.vanderbilt. edu/VUCC/Docs/Misc/bdgtti/ bdg_tochtml#S).
But there is a problem with all the above claims because accessibility and
interactivity with people and information do not in themselves automatically lead to
democracy, mainly because one of the basic characteristics of democracy is that
everybody has an influence on government decisions. It is true that the Internet gives
people more choice than the dominant mass media, through e-mails, electronic bulletin
boards, and discussion groups. Users can even e-mail Bill Clinton if they want to, to
express their views or to complaint about political issues. Hence, the Internet makes it
seems easier to communicate and to deal with bureaucracy. It gives the sense of more
direct contact with decision-making processes because it almost eliminates the distance
between citizens and the 'powers', but in reality the Internet does not affect the way we
are governed. The fact that the Internet exists does not mean that the 'powers' will ask
about people's opinions. On the one hand a fantasy of instant democracy is conjured
up when for example Ross Perot talks of asking people to 'vote now' via e-mail on
social or political issues, but on the other hand people could only vote on
predetermined choices, as always. As the whole system becomes more efficient with
the Internet, it may become vital to have access to it in order to make everyday
decisions as well as to cast a vote in a general election, but then we would see the
Internet creating a new division: one between those who are connected to it and those
who are not.
Leonard Marks, former director of the US Information Agency argues that
global electronic networks will pose new questions about information flow and cultural
integrity.
 These networks will move massive amounts of information through
high-speed circuits across national boundaries. Moreover they will be
effectively beyond the reach of the traditional forms of censorship and
control. The only way to 'censor' an electronic network moving...649
million bits per second is literally to pull the plug. The international
extension of electronic mail transmission, data packet networks and
information bank retrieval systems in future years will have
considerably more effect on national cultures than any direct broadcast
system (quoted in Smith 1980:57).
However, with the Internet you cannot actually pull the plug because there is no central
supercomputer which exercises control over one network. There are hundreds of
supercomputers and thousands of networks. Thus nobody can 'pull the plug' of the
Internet "because a fundamental principle of its architecture was maximum feasible
decentralisation and adaptability. Nor can anyone paralyse traffic; the original design
requirement was for a system that could function through a nuclear war" (Harrison
1994:4).
The true value of the Internet is less about information and more about
community, Negroponte claims. "The Information Superhighway is more than a short
cut to every book in the library of Congress. It is creating a totally new, global social
fabric" (Negroponte 1995:183). Surveys have proved that the things that users find
more interesting in the Internet are on-line conferencing and chat where many people
can interact simultaneously in virtual places in real time. An industry observer claims
that people are willing to pay just to connect, just for the opportunity to communicate
(see Stone 1995:66). But how can we talk about community when the physical site
does not exist and the notion of locality, meaning people living face to face with others,
is eliminated? But such a community is not without precedent. There were always
communities where people shared things with others without living with them face to
face, like communities based on ideology such as religion and politics. Also the media
gave us the opportunity to create communities of choice and interest alongside the
communities of space and residence. Internet promoters named it 'global village' (see
page 27) because of its potential to create global communities and not so much for the
information it provides. Therefore if its promoters believe that it is the 'global village'
then one can rightly expect that McLuhan's name is in almost every text published on
the Internet and on the virtual communities, from books like B. Woolley's Virtual
Worlds, M. Heim's The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality and T. Leary's Chaos and
Cyberculture, to journals and magazines like the WIRED which in its premiere U.K
edition dedicated five pages to a quotation from Marshall McLuhan.
But is the Internet itself the 'global village' that McLuhan argues about or is it
just a means, which enables communities to become global? Internet creates new kind
of communities that one cannot see except on a computer screen and cannot visit
except through the keyboard. The Internet can also be regarded as organising and
representing existing communities. It is an extra aid for such communities to become
more widely known and accessible like for example the Jazz fans community, the
Greenpeace, and many others.
JazzNet is a 'place' in the Internet where Jazz fans can find information about
magazines, festivals, record catalogues, a Jazz society newsletter, and other subjects
related to Jazz music. Jazz fans of course existed long before the Internet and they can
find this kind of information through all the channels of communication that the
JazzNet's home page displays. The difference now is that on the Internet this
information is instantly accessible to Jazz fans and also to other people around the
world, who do not consider themselves as such, but who may have some kind of
interest in this kind of music which can be further developed through the Net (see
http://www.earthlink.net/~jazzave/).
Another example is the GreenNet, Greenpeace's network, which is designed for
use by environment, peace, human rights, and development groups and is operated as a
not-for-profit organization. The network is based in the U.K but it also has close
working relationships with other partner networks in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the
Middle East, and the Pacific. GreenNet's work exists in the context of a larger social
movement, sharing a commitment to an improved future for our planet and its people.
Many such organizations now offer their information on the Internet. Before
GreenNet, Greenpeace provided this information through various media, but now
everything is updated on the GreenNet's Web page and therefore it is easier for one to
be informed and further to be active (see http://www.gn.apc.org/).
I will cite another example because I think that it is quite interesting. It
concerns Christianity, one of the largest existing communities on Earth. There is a
Web Chapel on the Internet where one can get information on how to become a
Christian. When I first 'visited' the Web Chapel it occurred to me that now even the
church is using Internet to approach people in a new way. I became a bit suspicious
though, when I read the whole document. I started thinking that maybe the whole thing
is a kind of joke from a 'cyberfreak'. At the end of the document there is the following
paragraph:
My prayer for you is that you will seek the Lord with all of your heart
and you will not be disappointed in Who you find. I know him
personally, and He longs for you to know Him too.
In His Grace
Chaplain Steve

[P.S] Thanks for visiting Web Chapel. Add Web Chapel to your list of
places to stop on the information highway, and rest in the Lord from
your weary travels through cyberspace.
(http://www.iadfw.net/webchap/).
Nevertheless, usually behind the Internet's page of such existing communities
there are organisations, foundations, institutions, and individuals which one can see and
visit with one's physical body and not only through the computer screen and the
keyboard. These communities are using the Internet to become wider known, as they
use television, radio, and the press. The extra benefit that they can have using the
Internet is that they can update their information any time and also they can
communicate with individuals through e-mail and on-line conferencing about subjects
of interest.
But the Internet is not concerned only with communities of interest, but also
concerned with national communities. For example, PaddyNet is an Irish theme
entertainment and information site of the WWW. It is a place on the Internet where
Irish people, and those people who are interested in Irish entertainment, culture, music,
and arts are able to go and see what is happening in those areas. "History provides
Irish people with its identity and common heritage. The technologies like the Internet,
offers the facility for a global community to contribute to the future of Ireland" ('The
Net', BBC 2 10-6-95). Another kind of community that the Internet forms is a kind of
'hybrid', virtual and real community at the same time like the Digital City
(http://dds.nl/). Digital City was founded in 1994 as an experiment in civic
networking. The City of Amsterdam and the Ministry of Economic Affairs created a
text-based bulletin board to provide useful local information. Almost immediately
after its creation a WWW server replaced the original system, and the Internet
 augmented dial-up access to the Digital City and the City acquired its first digital
inhabitants. Today the Digital City is a virtual city but there are still connections to the
real City of Amsterdam (see Hinssen 1995:53).
However, there are communities that exist only in the network and they are
dependent on it. Rheingold argues that:
whenever computer-mediated-communications becomes available to
people anywhere, they inevitably build virtual communities with it, just
as microorganisms create colonies. I suspect that one of the
explanations for this phenomenon is the hunger for community that
grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more
informal public spaces disappear from our real lives. (Rheingold
1994:6)
In these fantasy worlds people can interact simultaneously creating intimate
relationships with others whom they never physically meet. When one enters one of
these worlds it is like stepping into a whole new reality where one can find everything
that exists in one's real life and also in one's fantasy. These worlds are mostly known
as MUDs, which stands for Multiple User Domain or Dungeon. A newer form of the
MUD is a MOO, MUD Object Oriented. MUDs are usually more 'gamelike' virtual
worlds where people are concerned with getting points and keeping score by fighting
monsters and solving quests. MOOs are on-line worlds where socialising is more
important than game playing. They are virtual realities where people can meet and
hang out together, and also they can create their own objects and places using a built-in
programming language.23 Negroponte argues that:
In a very real sense, MUDs and MOOs are a 'third place', not home and
not work. Some people today spend eight hours a day there. In the
year 2000 more people will be entertaining themselves on the Internet
than by looking at what we call the networks today. The Internet will
evolve beyond MUDs and MOOs (which sounds a bit too much like
Woodstock in the 1960s here in the 1990s in digital form) and start to
serve up a broader range of entertainment ( Negroponte 1995:182).
Arthur C.Clarke adds on this: "I can envision an era of total couch potatoes, when we
have our legs amputated because it just wastes energy to keep them
functioning!" (see http://www.lsi.usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke/ACC.OnLifeAndDeath.
html).

23
For more information about the history, the structure, and the function of these virtual worlds see Sean Carton
Internet Virtual Worlds: Quick Tour. U.S.A.: Ventana press 1995, and also Sherry Turkle LIFE ON THE SCREEN:
Identity in the Age of the Internet. 1995, forthcoming.
 MUDs and MOOS are text-based virtual realities and in order to experience
them one needs a 3D high-resolution imagination and not any specially designed
helmets, body suits, goggles, and data gloves. "Both cyberspace and magical space are
purely manifest in the imagination. Both spaces are entirely constructed by [one's]
thoughts and beliefs" (Pesce quoted in Davis 1995:62). A MUD world is like a novel
world but with the basic difference that in the MUD world the user/character decides
who he/she is going to be and where he/she going. Therefore the MUDs are full of
nonfictional characters and real people who are experiencing the same MUD from their
own point of view determine what they say and do. People use MUDs to "improvise
melodramas, build worlds and all the objects in them, solve puzzles, invent
amusements and tools, compete for prestige and power, gain wisdom, seek revenge,
indulge greed and lust and the violent impulses. You can find disembodied sex in
some MUDs. In the right kind of MUD, you can even kill -- or die" (Rheingold
1994:145). Users can also invent a new identity for themselves, they can be whatever
they want to be. The characters one creates for a MUD are referred to as one's
personas or personae, a word that has the Latin origin personae which means "that
through which the sound comes", in other words an actor's mask (see Turkle 1995
typescript, ch.7:8). There are hundreds of MUDs on the Internet and one can
participate in as many MUDs as one wants with as many identities as one wants. Also
one can be in more than one MUD at the same time with the use of multiple computer
windows, which give the user the possibility to work in many programs at the same
time on one screen. One's identity on the computer is the sum of one's distributed
presence in the computer's windows as Turkle argues (see Turkle 1995 typescript,
intro:5).
In every MUD the user has the choice to create a new identity, to be a male, a
female or whatever he/she wants. For example when one enters in a MUD named the
'Games of Death' then one has to answer questions to determine one's character, class,
sex, race, starting wealth, and attributes. Under each of these categories there are many
choices, considering the race one can choose to be a human, or a vampire, or a troll, or
an elf, or even an artificial lifeform. Rheingold argues that the MUDs are quite popular
because they are based on computer-mediated-communications media, which seem to
dissolve boundaries of identity, similar to the way previous electronic media dissolve
 social boundaries related to time and space (see Rheingold 1994:146-147). But behind
the personae the characters are real and consequently MUD life has all the intricacy of
real life. Heim points out the people who make simulations24 inevitably incorporate
their own perceptions and beliefs, loading cyberspace with their prejudices as well as
their insights (see Heim 1993:82). "People in virtual communities do just about
everything people do in real-life, but [they] leave [their] bodies behind" (Rheingold
1994:3). But MUD players believe that in a MUD they can do things, which they
cannot do in their real life, for example in a MUD they can define their virtual world.
In the following I will cite part of a very interesting talk I had with a MUD
player, about 'life in a MUD'. Colin is 20 years old and he is a student in the Physics
department at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has been familiar with
computers for seven years now, but he discovered the Internet and as well MUDs, two
years ago when he came to the university, thanks to the computer facilities that the
university provides. For almost six hours every day he lives in a MUD. He used to be
a character in several MUDs during these two years, but for the moment he is playing
only in one called the Nanvaent, a fantasy-role playing MUD as he describes it. He
never changed his identity in the MUDs and usually most of the participants do the
same, but of course there are also many others who adopt a new identity for fun or for
convenience. He argues that MUDs are hierarchical and not democratic. At the top of
the hierarchy is the 'God', the person who designs the MUD, and then follow the 'High
Lords', the 'Lords', the 'Creators' and the 'Trial Creators'. The only way to step forward
in this hierarchy is to gain points while you play in the MUD. The Nanvaent MUD
does not allow players to have more than one character 'logged on' at the same time as
a matter of justice because there is a restriction on the number of players that can
participate simultaneously. Further, he argues that males are dominant in the MUDs
for the simple reason that up until now males have had more access to computers than
females. But now that most of the universities are connected with the Internet,
meaning that all their students have access to it, many females have also started to
participate in MUDs. "People believe that our social life is not good or that it does not
even exist and therefore we participate in a MUD because it is easy to make one there,

24
Benjamin Woolley argues that everything a computer does can be seen as simulation (Woolley 1993:6). For more
extensive account see Benjamin Woolley Virtual Worlds. London: Penguin Books. 1993, pp. 40-56 "Simulation".
but this is not true. I have friends and also I met a lot of new ones through the MUD,
even from this university, with whom I meet in real life. In the MUD one is able to
meet people with the same interests, people who cannot meet in any other way. People
from different cities, countries, even continents. And anyway, social life in the MUD
is much cheaper than any other social life, in fact it costs nothing as soon as one is
connected...... The good thing with the MUD is that you can define how you want it. It
is not like the real world where there is no way to do this. It is like you have a copy of
life and the opportunity to make it suit you. Of course there are rules and politics in
every MUD but if you do not like them then you can just simply leave one MUD and
go to another". Finally he believes that the computer generated technology cannot ever
replace the real thing because there is always a missing element, but on the other hand
it gives a lot of advantages to people, like the opportunity to build virtual worlds.
Colin's story is a version of the average player. But there is always the other
side of the coin. Turkle claims that MUDs are 'identity workshops'. The fact that the
players are known only by the name of their character in the MUD, gives them the
opportunity to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with
their identity and also to try out new ones.
MUDs actively subvert the very notion of identity, which has always
been tied to a notion of unity and authenticity. MUDs make possible
the creation of an identity so fluid and multiple that it strains the limits
of the notion. Identity after all, refers to the sameness between two
qualities, in this case between a person and his or her persona. But in
MUDs, one can be many. (Turkle 1995 typescript, intro:5)
Colin claims that he participates only in one MUD, but most of the players participate
in more than one thanks to the windows software, downgrading sometimes real life to
just one more window (see Turkle 1995 typescript, intro:7). But digitally generated
virtual worlds are becoming even more sophisticated with the use of 3D on-line spaces.
The general framework of these worlds is the same one that MUDs have. The
difference is that these worlds are not only text-based as the MUDs are. The
environment is a three dimension (3D) space and the population consists of Avatars:
representatives of actual humans on-line. There are certain things that the users cannot
do in this virtual world, for example they cannot feel the heat of the sun, or smell the
grass, or feel the wind blowing across their faces. But also there is one major thing that
one can only do in virtual worlds: to represent one's identity as Avatar to other people
across the world instantaneously with the click of a button.

The Net will suffer plenty of growing pains, and it may not change the
world as much as the cyber-Utopians have us believe: compared with
the richness of real life, even the best on-line 'virtual spaces' are
cartoons. But it is here to stay, and it will allow people to exercise one
of their most basic desires: to communicate. This, they will be able to
do on an unprecedented scale: globally, openly, to one person or many.
(The Economist, 1995c:4)
_________________________________
 SOME CONCLUSIONS
Thus far, I have tried to give a full account of what the Internet is and what
kinds of community it constructs and sustains. I am aware that I have left several
aspects out of this 'full account', such as the new electronic economy, which is
embodied in it. But unfortunately in a paper of limited length this is almost inevitable.
However, I believe that with what I have covered so far, I am in a position to answer
my initial question: whether or not the Internet is the 'global village' that McLuhan
envisioned. But before I go on to any conclusions I believe that it is essential to see the
Internet as a whole in the context of the new computer technology in general. This
technology now gives people the possibility of tele-presence which means tele-
education, tele-working, tele-shopping, tele-entertainment and as many other tele- as
one can imagine. Today we can send our alter ego to settle in a 'soft city', perhaps in
the 'City of Bits' where to click on a building is enough for one to enter in it (see
Mitchell 1995:131).25 Our physical body and our physical space are no longer
prerequisites for communication. Traditionally people used to be at or go to some
place in order to communicate and issues like 'who you are' and 'how you represent
yourself' by your clothing, your behaviour, or your body language were very important.
"Each familiar species of public place had its actors, costumes and scripts. But the
worldwide computer network -- the electronic agora -- subverts, displays, and radically
redefines our notions of gathering place, community, and urban life" (see Mitchell
1995:8-9). One can be everywhere and at the same time nowhere, can be oneself or
can be somebody or something else, or even can be many 'selves' at the same time.
Maybe a 'global village' is emerging in the networks but it is not the same one
that McLuhan envisioned. It is true that most of the virtues that the Internet projects
match exactly with what McLuhan proclaimed: decentralization, involvement,
democracy. The Internet has some of the same characteristics as the acoustic space
which is the 'garden of Eden' for McLuhan. Acoustic space, and the Internet as well,
has the basic character of a space whose focus or centre is simultaneously everywhere,
and whose margin is nowhere. But the Internet declares individualism as the supreme

25
The City of Bits is basically a book by William Mitchell. It is an introduction to a new type of city, a largely
invisible but increasingly important system of virtual space interconnected by the emerging information superhighway. It
also has its WWW counterpart in the Internet where one can also find hundreds of 'hot' links to other sites with
additional information on the topics discussed. It contains 55 primary hot links covering a full range of issues, from
advertising and bookstores, to weather and virtual reality. See http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/City_of_Bits
principle. Timothy Leary argues that the postpolitical information society is based on
individual thinking (Leary 1994:74). On the contrary, McLuhan is against
individualism, which he claims is a consequence of the civilization which itself is a
product of the phonetic alphabet. "When we speak of a global village, we should keep
in mind that every village makes villains, and when civilization reaches a certain
degree of density, the barbaric tribes return, from within. Tribes shun their independent
thinkers and punish individuality" (Heim 1993:103).
Also, McLuhan's 'global village' had its physical location on the Earth itself and
not in 'cyberspace', and its settlements were real people and not their electronic alter
ego. It is hard to judge if the Internet, the 'virtual global village', will contribute to the
construction of the real one because what technology gives us with the one hand it
often takes away with the other. Our devices give us greater personal autonomy but
simultaneously they disrupt the familiar networks of direct association. With these
devices we have the power to flit about the planet, and thus our communities grow
more fragile, airy and ephemeral even as our connections multiply (see Heim 1993:99).
Heim says:
Being a body constitutes the principle behind our separateness from one
another and behind our personal presence. Our bodily existence stands
at the forefront of our personal identity and individuality. Both law and
morality recognize the physical body as something of a fence, an
absolute boundary, establishing and protecting our privacy. Now the
computer networks simply brackets the physical presence of the
participants, by either omitting or simulating corporeal immediacy. In
one sense this frees us from the restrictions imposed by our physical
identity. We are more equal on the net because we can either ignore or
create the body that appears in cyberspace. But in another sense, the
quality of the human encounter narrows. The secondary or stand-in
body reveals only as much of ourselves as we mentally wish to reveal.
Bodily contact becomes optional; you need never stand face-to-face
with other members of the virtual community. You can live your own
separate existence without ever physically meeting another person [...]
At the computer interface, the spirit migrates from the body to a world
of total representation. Information and images float through the
Platonic mind without a grounding in bodily experience. You can lose
your humanity at the throw of the dice. (Heim 1993:99-100)
Rheingold argues that we build virtual communities because the informal
public spaces have disappeared from our real lives (Rheingold 1994:6). But is it really
sensible to suggest that the new way to revitalize community is to sit alone in our room
typing at our networked computers and filling our lives with virtual friends? (see
Turkle 1995 typescript, ch.9:5). Virtuality gives us the privilege of the global, but
sometimes at the expense of the local.
McLuhan argued that we are not prepared for the advent of the global village
because on the one hand we live mythically and integrally, but on the other hand we
continue to think in the old fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age
(see McLuhan 1994:25). Therefore we have to change our way of thinking, our
culture, to become citizens of the 'global village'. Leary argues that we have already
changed our culture. Electronic culture, he claims, is not culture but counterculture.
Culture's emotional attitude is based on fear, but counterculture's emotional attitude is
based on scientific optimism. "The 21st century will witness a new global culture,
peopled by new breeds who honour human individuality, human complexity, and
human potential, enlightened immortals who communicate at light speed and design
the technologies for their scientific re-animation" (Leary 1994:82). The new breed is
the Nintendo generation of the 1980’s, which became a pioneer group of cybernauts.
"They were the first humans to zap through the Alice Window and change electronic
patterns on the other side of the screen. They will operate in cyberspace, the electronic
environment of the 21st century" (ibid).
But have we really changed our culture as Leary would like to think, or this is
true only for people in United States of America? Martin Jacques, the Deputy Editor of
the Independent, argues: "the Net is global but American, American but global. If we
want to understand the philosophy and the strategies of cyberspace we have to talk to
Americans, or those based in America, even though its ramifications affect us all ('The
Net', 10-6-1995 BBC2).
Serena Vicary of the University of Pavia, who has been studying the
teleworking phenomenon for the last three years, believes that 'lone eagles', people who
are able and willing to live and work in isolation from a wider community, are an
American import that will not adapt well to European soil. She argues that the
technological limits are breaking down much faster than the social limits. "You can't
smell your nextdoor neighbour in the global village, and that's a big drawback in
[countries like Italy] where people thrive on physical proximity" (WIRED 1995c:84).
The artist Brian Eno also claims that Africans would not stand for the computer's
technology, that it is imprisoning for them. He says that their culture is body-oriented
and the computer only requires a very small part of the body: just one's hand to hold
the mouse, and one's eyes (see WIRED 1995a:89). The suggestion is that despite
changes in technology that basic culture does not change.
In other countries political systems may prevent the Internet from having a
significant affect on people's lives. One example is China: in 1989, communication
technology played a significant role in the massive demonstrations of Chinese students
for democracy. Chinese students had used the Internet and fax machines to propagate
their views to the world wide audience, established a dialogue through that media with
other people irrespective of the geographical division. Shortly after the demonstrations
the government attempted to control new channels of international communication to
curb the damage done to its credibility by the free flow of information. For example in
1989 it tried to limit the spread of fax machines by passing a law, which stipulated that
individuals had to register their fax machines with the authorities. Also in 1993 the
Prime Minister, Li Peng, announced a ban on the private use of satellite dishes capable
of receiving foreign television broadcasts. Therefore, in the same framework the
authorities denied to the Chinese access to the Internet until January 1995 when finally
China was connected to it (see The Economist 1995a:55). But how much access China
give its people is unclear. Therefore a lot of computer literate Chinese used to find
ways into the Internet via Hong Kong. Last March, Hong Kong police shut down
seven (from eight) Internet service providers. Until this incident Hong Kong prided
itself on being the most deregulated and unrestricted Internet access point on the planet.
The police gave some legal explanation for this act, but there are concerns that Hong
Kong authorities are bowing to China's demands on regulation of information (see
Winchester 1995:27). In 1997 Hong Kong will become a part of China again, after
100 years as a British colony, and China has 'informally' the authority to do this. A
Western diplomat argues, that as Chinese authorities can pull the plug on telephone
conversations, it would not be surprising if access to the Internet were denied during
politically sensitive times (quoted in Curry 1994:66).
There are also other reasons why the Internet is not as global as some claim.
We have already seen that the phone system for two-thirds of the global population is
non-existent. It is true that areas, which have no other medium of communication,
would greatly benefit from access to the Internet. But people who cannot afford the
technology will not be citizens of the 'global village' called the Internet. This creates a
vicious circle, because not being connected to the Internet increases the economic gulf
between countries, which are improving their economies due to the efficiency of
electronic communication, and those countries that cannot. Survival is the priority for
the poor of developing countries. Therefore computer technology can be seen as
irrelevant to their basic needs such as food and clean water. However, technology
could be a major factor in the improvement of these countries economical situation.
Access to the Internet could for example inform and educate about ways of improving
agricultural and other techniques and resources.
Further, the Internet's dominant language is English. Thus, for the present
people who do not know the English language are also excluded from the 'global
village'. In addition, we have to take into consideration the average user of the Internet.
For example the Digital City's average inhabitant is around 30 years old, male, highly
educated, and computer-literate. This is true for the Internet as a whole and not only
for the Digital City. Therefore, how can the Internet be global and create a digital
democracy, if it is populated by an elite? Another example can be seen in the worlds of
MUDs and MOOs, which are not democratic at all, but highly hierarchical.
Negroponte argues that the main value of the Internet lies in its ability to encourage the
creation of communities. One can then say that the Internet does not have
democratizing potential because the communities that are dependent on it are not
democratic. Despite positive claims for the Internet as a 'global village' there are a
number of reasons why this is not so. These reasons are inevitably related to serious
problems in our world such as poverty, cultural and political control. However, while
the Internet accentuates some of these problems, the fact is that it exists. Because of
this, it is important that we make all efforts to use it to try to improve our world whilst
being aware of the potential dangers it may contain. Pierre Lévy rightly believes that
we should start exploring the positive aspects of the Internet such as the 'democratizing'
aspects, which it does have -- the fact that it is interactive, decentralised, and less
hierarchical than the dominant mass media. If we are not going to do this soon our
worst dreams about misuse will inevitably translate into reality. Finally, if we want to
create a 'global village' then let us do it on Earth, and not in cyberspace, where physical
human beings become estranged from each other. Further, let us move away from the
limited and contradictory concept of the 'global village' to a more realistic ideal, such as
the 'global city' because a city can be truly multicultural and does not presuppose face-
to-face contact.
_________________________________
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