Global village

The term global village is attributed to the Canadian writer and communication theorist Marshal McLuhan (1911-1980) in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy published in 1962 in which he wrote that the globe had contracted into a village through the use of electronic media. There is evidence he may have read about the concept in America and the Cosmic Man by Wyndham Lewis in 1948 where Lewis wrote, “now that the earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other”. Lewis and McLuhan happened to be close friends and could well have discussed the concept, but McLuhan was certainly the first to use the phrase global village. According to his son, Eric McLuhan, his father was using the phrase ‘global village’ long before he published his book where it first appeared in print. See also Medium is the message.