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McLuhan’s Global Village and the Internet

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McLuhan’s global village and the internet

Elissavet Georgiadou

introduction
The invention of several revolutionary means of communication and
transportation in the early 20th century generated numerous pre-
dictions 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 the academic literature.
In 1934 Lewis Mumford claimed that with the invention of the tel-
egraph, 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 com-
munications 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 Universi-
ty’s Senate House entitled ‘The Unification of the World’ argued,
“the developments in transport and communication had created -
or would create - a single planetary society” (quoted in Clarke
1993:9).
One of the most important theories was that of Herbert Marshall
McLuhan. He argued in the ’60s 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. “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). “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 re-evaluate practically every thought,
every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Eve-
rything 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).
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 radio, telephone, and television into a ‘global village’. But
most of what he said makes more sense today than in the 60’s,
as the leading powers of Western world have pinned their hopes
for a better future on electronic networks, wired and wireless. The
Internet, the network of networks, can bring all the media in our
personal computer and have the potential to connect all the homes
on the planet with endless sources of information, communica-

Elissavet Georgiadou 91
 tion, education, and entertainment. In order to examine whether
the Internet is the ‘global village’ that McLuhan argued about, next,
the paper would discuss his argument through his own writings.

McLuhan’s argument on “global village”

The famous phrase ‘global village’ is part of his whole argument
about oral and print culture. McLuhan argues that man in any
moment of consciousness is aware of all the senses simultane-
ously. Any effort to impart this unique experience from one person
to another necessitates both distortion and simplification. There-
fore 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 ges-
tures and facial expression, in order to emphasise or to make
more clear what he means. Therefore all the senses are 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 reac-
tion 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 ge-
ometry, has the basic characters of lineality, connectedness, ho-
mogeneity, 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 mecha-
nization of writing. “The invention of typography confirmed and ex-
tended the new visual stress of 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

92 1st International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication

cult of individualism (see McLuhan 1962:206). Further, print, “in
turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, cre-
ated the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism”
(McLuhan 1962:199). With print the private fixed point of view be-
came 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 discover-
ies, which have recreated the simultaneous field in all human af-
fairs “our specialist and fragmented civilization of centre-margin
structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous re-assem-
bling 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). “Tel-
evision 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 threat-
ened” (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 simultane-
ously 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 con-
tent of the message but the total effect. Our basic concern with
effect rather than meaning is an outcome of our electric time.

Elissavet Georgiadou 93
 “[E]ffect involves the total situation, and not a single level of infor-
mation movement [sic]” (McLuhan 1994:26). Therefore when peo-
ple 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 glo-
bal scale, and also a village cannot be so 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 cen-
tral nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human
experience. (McLuhan 1994:358)
The enthusiasm with which the ‘global village’ is anticipated is
obvious here; something extremely promising is happening with
electricity. The use of the word free inspires a positive associa-
tion. 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 intui-
tion and of terror’, the argument does not appear promising any
more. However, this threat soon changes into promise writing that
“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

94 1st International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication

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 pre-
pared 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 isola-
tion. We are as numb in our new electric world as the native
involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (McLuhan 1994:16)
McLuhan argues that the new electric technology threatens
the ancient technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet,
and our Western values built on the written word have been seri-
ously affected (see McLuhan 1994:82). However, it is not 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,
the product of phonetic literacy, 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 ac-
customed 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 aware-
ness that manifests itself in a complete shift in our sensory lives.
(Ashley Montagu quoted in McLuhan 1989:23-24)
It is obvious that McLuhan’s argument, beyond its inconsist-
ency, is on the whole full of enthusiasm for the idea of the ‘global
village’. In Counterblast, where he gives some of the characteris-
tics of human relations in the ‘global village’, his enthusiasm and
his optimistic view are explicit and the only question he expresses
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 writes in Counterblast that the effect of extending the cen-
tral 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

Elissavet Georgiadou 95
 every event. The new human settlements in terms of the contract-
ing ‘global village’ must consider “the new factor of total involve-
ment 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 com-
munity of continuous learning, a single campus in which every-
body, 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 set-
tlement is to extend consciousness itself and to maximize the
opportunity of learning” (ibid). In contrast with the earlier mechani-
cal 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, of inclusive conscious-
ness, and deep personal involvement. The crisis in human settle-
ment arises from a clash between these two opposed forms of
culture and technology” (ibid). But how viable is McLuhan’s argu-
ment today? Is new information and communication technology
capable of creating a ‘global village’ with the above characteris-
tics? Is it true that the electronic network re-tribalised man and
placed him in the ‘global village’?

The Internet as the ‘Global Village’

The Internet is a new space that exists only through computer
networked technology, a cyberspace, 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 modem, a subscrip-
tion to an Internet service provider, and of course a telephone line
and electricity supply.
Once one connected, can communicate asynchronous or in
real time using text, sound, images and video with people around
the world at a fraction of the cost of phone calls. S/he can access
hundreds of information databases and libraries worldwide and re-
trieve any of thousands of documents, journals, books, and com-
puter software. In addition s/he can also stay up to date with wire-
service news and sports, weather reports etc.
Moreover, people can make art, and also they have the oppor-
tunity 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 peo-
ple turn to the Internet for anonymous discussions on newsgroups
and confidential counselling through e-mail. 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’.
Some of the people put data on the Internet because it has the

96 1st International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication

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 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.
Anyone with a connection to the Internet can put any kind of
information on to it, from astrophysics to a recipe for a fruitcake,
even hard pornography. Many people argue that they use the
Internet as a very open public space where individuals get their
voice onto and express their views. This argument is connected to
the idea that till very recently people lacked such a place because
of the centralization of the top-down media like broadcasting chan-
nels and newspapers. Therefore the Internet with its communica-
tion channels fulfils a very important role in allowing the expres-
sion of any thoughts and providing for people a space to
communicate directly with each other without intervention by any
authority. The fact that it is very liberated in some ways, makes it,
however, very threatening because it is also used for very racist
and misogynist ideas; very unpleasant dark sides of people’s per-
sonalities.
Censorship is a way to control unpleasant behaviours and to
keep ‘indecent’ material out of our sight. The question is whether
existing laws can govern the Internet adequately. Whether a place
on the Internet is physically located in New York or Amsterdam
matters little to a user, who can ‘visit’ either with a click of the
mouse. What is legal in Amsterdam may not be legal in New York
and vice versa. Also the fact that the Internet’s whole structure is
decentralised and anarchic, as there is no single authority that
governs it, does not help censors. Moreover, most Internet filtering
programs are ineffective when it comes to protecting children from
harmful material on the Net.
Internet technology now gives people the possibility of tele-
presence, meaning tele-education, tele-working, tele-shopping,
tele-entertainment and as many different tele- as one can imag-
ine. Today we can send our alter ego to settle in a ‘soft city’,
where to click on a building is enough for one to enter in it (see
Mitchell 1995:131). 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 cloth-
ing, your behaviour, or your body language were very important.
Each well-known type of public place has its actors, costumes
and scripts. However, worldwide computer network known as the
Internet and as the ‘electronic agora’ subverts, displays, and radi-
cally redefines our notions of gathering place, community, and

Elissavet Georgiadou 97
 urban life. 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.
Cyberutopians claim that whoever gains the political edge of
the telecommunications technology will be able to use the tech-
nology to consolidate power. They believe that the Utopian vision
of the electronic agora, an ‘Athens without slaves’, is possible by
telecommunication and cheap computers, and could be imple-
mented through decentralised networks like the Internet, because
individuals can have some of the same media powers that the
political ‘big boys’ wield. Internet technology if properly understood
and defended by enough citizens, have democratising potential in
the way that alphabets and printing presses had (see Rheingold
1993:278-279).
The Internet constructs and sustains several types of commu-
nities. Existing communities, such as religious communities, edu-
cation communities, music communities etc. uses the Internet as
a means organising and promoting their views. But is it the ‘global
village’ that McLuhan argues about or is it just a means, which
enables communities to become global?
However, there are communities that exist only in the Internet
and they are dependent on it. One cannot see them except on a
computer screen and cannot visit them except through the key-
board. In these virtual worlds people can interact simultaneously
creating intimate relationships with others whom they never physi-
cally meet. When one enters one of these worlds it is like step-
ping into a whole new reality where s/he can find everything that
exists in a person’s real life and/or fantasy. These worlds, mostly
known as MUDs (Multiple User Domain or Dungeon) are text-based
virtual realities with a ‘gamelike’ character, where people are con-
cerned with getting points and keeping score by fighting monsters
and solving quests. There are also MUDs where socialising is more
important than game playing and people can meet and hang out
together, creating their own objects and places. There are hun-
dreds of virtual worlds on the Internet and the user has the choice
to create a new identity, to be a male, a female or whatever s/he
wants. S/he can participate in as many as s/he wants with as
many identities possible at the same. “One’s identity on the com-
puter is the sum of one’s distributed presence in the computer’s
windows” (Turkle 1995).
Digitally generated virtual worlds are becoming even more so-
phisticated with the use of 3D on-line spaces. The basic idea of
these worlds is the same with MUDs. The difference is that these
worlds are not only text-based as MUDs are. The environment is a
three-dimension (3D) space and the population consists of Ava-
tars: representatives of actual humans on-line. There are certain
things that the users cannot do in this virtual world, for example

98 1st International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication

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.
As we saw earlier, McLuhan argues that the new human settle-
ments of the ‘global village’ must consider the new factor of total
involvement of each of us in the lives and actions of all. However, in
the virtual worlds that emerge in the Internet the settlements are
not human, they are Avatars.

some conclusions
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, and 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, have 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
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 pho-
netic alphabet. “When we speak of a global village, we should
keep in mind that every village makes villains, and when civiliza-
tion 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 with physical bodies and not their electronic alter ego.
It is hard to judge whether the Internet, the ‘virtual global village’,
will contribute to the construction of a real one. Information and
telecommunication networks give us greater personal autonomy
but simultaneously they disrupt the familiar networks of direct as-
sociation. 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.
It is argued that we build virtual communities on the Internet
because the informal public spaces have disappeared from our
real lives. But is it really sensible to suggest that the new way to
revitalize community is to sit alone in our room typing at our net-
worked computers and filling our lives with virtual friends? “Virtuality
gives us the privilege of the global, but sometimes at the expense
of the local. At the computer interface, the spirit migrates from the

Elissavet Georgiadou 99
 body to a world of total representation. Information and images
float through the Platonic mind without grounding in bodily experi-
ence. You can lose your humanity at the throw of the dice” (Heim
1993:99-100).
The findings from a study organized by the San Jose, California
Marital and Sexuality Center demonstrate that about 6.5 percent
of male Internet users are compulsive cybersex fans, with online
fantasy lives so intense that their off-line relationships may suffer.
Moreover, a recent survey showed that thirty percent of teenage
girls said they had been sexually harassed in a chat room. Only 7
percent, however, told their mothers or fathers about the harass-
ment, as they were worried that their parents would ban them from
going online. Most of the girls surveyed said they tried to avoid
pornographic sites, but said they frequently receive pornographic
spam, or accidentally end up on a porn site. Also, around 7 per-
cent of children in the UK, claimed to have been harassed in Internet
chatrooms, while 4 percent had been bullied via email.
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 think-
ing, our culture, to become citizens of the ‘global village’. Leary
argues that we have already changed our culture. Electronic cul-
ture, he claims, is not culture but counterculture. Culture’s emo-
tional attitude is based on fear, but counterculture’s emotional at-
titude 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 tech-
nologies for their scientific re-animation. 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 environ-
ment of the 21st century” (Leary 1994:82).
But have we really changed our culture, as Leary suggests?
Technological limits are breaking down much faster than the so-
cial limits. Serena Vicary of the University of Pavia, who has been
studying the tele-working phenomenon the last decade, 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. “You can’t smell your next
door neighbour in the global village, and that’s a big drawback in
countries 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

100 1st International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication

them. He says that their culture is body-oriented and the compu-
ter only requires a very small part of the body: just one’s hand to
hold the mouse, and one’s eyes (Wired 1995a:89). New research
has found that Internet use varies for different cultures. African
Americans and Hispanics use the Internet for very different rea-
sons than the general market and are sceptical about the notion
that the Internet created new social opportunities and removed
racial barriers (NUA, 2002).
In other countries the government policy may prevent the Internet
from having a significant affect on people’s lives. Chinese authori-
ties in Shanghai have shut down around 200 Internet café on May
2002; Turkey has passed a law making websites subject to the
same censorship as print media; Iranian police have shut down
over 400 cybercafes; allegedly because the former state telecom-
munications monopoly, the PTT, is worried about losing business
to the private sector; Saudi Arabia is set to ban 200,000 websites
the authorities there consider offensive, doubling the number of
sites on the banned list; also, economic sanctions and a lack of IT
skills have greatly hindered Internet access and technological de-
velopment in Iraq (NUA, 2002).
There are also other reasons why the Internet is not as global
as some claim. First, two-thirds of the global population does not
have access to the telephone network, which is prerequisite for
Internet connection. Besides, Table 1 illustrates that the digital
divide is obvious when comparing the figures of online population
across continents.

World Total 544.2 million

Africa 4.15 million
Asia/Pacific 157.49 million
Europe 171.35 million
Middle East 4.65 million
Canada & USA 181.23 million
Latin America 25.33 million

Table 1. Online population (February 2002, NUA Surveys)

In Africa and Middle East the online population is only 0.7 per-
cent of the world total, while Canada and USA dominates the
Internet global usage with 33 percent.
Second, the Internet’s dominant language is English as Figure
1 shows, a fact that proves that the Internet is not as multicultural
as McLuhan’s ideal ‘global village’. Thus, for the present people
who do not know the English language cannot access all the sites

Elissavet Georgiadou 101

 on the ‘global village’.
Third, as many surveys indicate, the average user of the Internet
around the world is 25-35 years old, male, highly educated, com-
puter-literate and with an income higher than the national average.
Interestingly, in USA males and females almost equally use the
Internet, while the other characteristics remain the same.
It is true that areas and people, 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 cir-
fig.1. The use of Languages on the cle, because not being connected to the Internet increases the
Web. economic gulf between countries, which are improving their econo-
mies due to the efficiency of electronic communication, and those
countries that cannot. Survival is the priority for the poor of devel-
oping countries. Therefore computer technology can be seen as
irrelevant to their basic needs such as food and clean water. How-
ever, 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 agricul-
tural and other techniques and resources.
But, how can the Internet be global and create a digital democ-
racy, if it is currently populated by an elite? Despite positive claims
for the Internet as a ‘global village’ we discussed a number of rea-
sons why this is not so. These reasons are inevitably related to
serious problems in our world such as poverty, cultural and politi-
cal control. The development of the Internet is interrelated to geo-
graphical and social inequalities.
However, while the Internet accentuates some of these prob-
lems, 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. In other words, if we
will become to realise McLuhan’s ‘global village’ we should try to
exploit Internet potentials to improve our physical existence and
not to create a virtual one. “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 trans-
late into reality”. (Pierre Lévy, Wired, 1995b).

102 1st International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication

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