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Global village is a term coined by Wyndham Lewis in his book America and Cosmic Man (1948). However, Herbert Marshall McLuhan also wrote about this term in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). His book describes how electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media.

Today, the global village is mostly used as a metaphor to describe the Internet and World Wide Web. The Internet globalizes communication by allowing users from around the world to connect with each other. Similarly, web-connected computers enable people to link their web sites together. This new reality has implications for forming new sociological structures within the context of culture. An example of this phenomenon is The Global Sports Village [1].

Although McLuhan refers to it by a toponym, the Global Village is actually a historical period, not a place. It was immediately preceded by what McLuhan calls the "Gutenberg Galaxy" (another geographical designation for a chronological period). Though its roots can be traced back to the invention of the "phonetic alphabet" (McLuhan's term for phonemic orthography), the Gutenberg Galaxy, like the Global Village that followed it, was ushered in by a technological innovation, the Gutenberg press.

However, the Gutenberg Galaxy phase of Western Civilization is being replaced—McLuhan is writing in the early 1960s—by what he calls "electronic interdependence," an era when electronic media replace the visual culture of the Gutenberg era, producing cognitive shifts and new social organizations based on aural/oral media technologies.

One sticking point in McLuhan's argument is his emphasis on the oral/aural nature of electronic media. McLuhan's thinking is clearly influenced by the technology and culture of the United States in the 1950s: he often makes references and draws analogies to jazz, the radio, the telephone. Critics in the 1960s were quick to point out that the most important new electronic technologies (film, television, computers) were, in fact, predominantly oriented towards the visual.

As a result of this shift in technology and media, McLuhan claims that humankind will move from the individualism and fragmentation that characterized the Gutenberg Galaxy to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the Global Village (in Gutenberg Galaxy, the term is always capitalized), a term which has predominantly negative connotations (a fact lost on its later popularizers):

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

Note McLuhan's characteristic stress on the importance of awareness of a medium's cognitive effects: If we are not conscious of how technology impacts cognition and society, the global village has the potential to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule. On the other hand, it could create a problem-solving world-wide forum, enabling a new sense of world community.

Through the 1960s, McLuhan had studied what effects the satellite environment had had on people, and the global village as a whole. He determined that the introduction of the satellite environment, or an iconic "proscenium arch" of satellites, created a "theater" of information and coverage that transformed the global village. In his book From Cliché to Archetype (1970), McLuhan used this percept to introduce the concept of the global theater.

Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere.^[1]

The understanding of a "theater," as McLuhan has it; relies upon his concept of the cliché, a repetitive and verbalized thought, action, phrase or artifact created by a technological environment, which is often pushed to the point that it later becomes an archetype; or non-verbal, unconscious percept of a then older environment.

Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché.^[2]

In other words, oral culture was made into archetype by its becoming cliché through the printed book.

McLuhan points out further complications caused by the global theater:

Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "past time are pastimes." The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of "past times" that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of "doubleness" or "interplay" because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.^[3]

This kind of condition would further complicate events within the global village, if not subsume it totally—as if all environments (electronic or otherwise) and their artifacts are constantly being retrieved simultaneously, the value of the old "tribal" terror and paranoia within the global village is made more transparent in the presence of constant and disruptive "cultural anarchy."

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