From Global Village To Global Theatre
No chapter in Understanding Media, or later books, contains the idea that the Global Village and the electronic media create unified communities. In fact, in an interview with Gerald Stearn, McLuhan says that it never occurred to him that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the Global Village. McLuhan argued that the Global Village ensures maximal disagreement on all points because it creates more discontinuity and division and diversity under the increase of the village conditions. The Global Village is far more diverse.
After the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan starts to use the term Global Theater to emphasise the changeover from consumer to producer, from acquisition to involvement, from job holding to role playing, stressing that there is no more community to clothe the naked specialist.
Read more about this topic: Global Village (term)
Famous quotes containing the words global, village and/or theatre:
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“When the enterprising burglar isn’t burgling,
When the cut-throat isn’t occupied in crime,
He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling,
And listen to the merry village chime.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd.”
—Sarah Bernhardt (1845–1923)