ELECTRONIC AGE AND THE RISE OF            GLOBAL VILLAGE

ELECTRONIC GADGETS START WITH THE CALCULATOR, THEY ARE THE BEGINNING OF THE TECHNOLOGY ERA. 

The Internet has transformed the physical citizens of a modern society into the netizens of a postmodern cyber community, as some hackers like to say. . In the new electronic Agora of the global village, publicity has assumed an international scale, while privacy means electronic privacy in our e-mail conversations. ... Even the way we think may in the long run be affected, for relational and associative reasoning is nowadays becoming as important as linear and inferential analysis, while visual thinking is once again considered to be at least as indispensable as symbolic processing. And as the skill of remembering vast amounts of facts is gradually replaced by the capacity for retrieving information and discerning logical patterns in masses of data, the Renaissance conception of erudition and mnemotechny is merging with the modern methods of information management. In the electronic village implemented by the global network, entire sectors of activities like communicating, writing, publishing and editing, advertising, selling, shopping and banking, or counseling, teaching and learning are all being deeply affected. Such transformations are of the greatest importance, as they will determine our lifestyle in the coming decades.

 The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village” —Marshall McLuhan.

In the late 1960s, Marshall McLuhan speculated that TV and other new telecommunications technologies were transforming the world into a single, “global village.” Events over the following 20 years suggested that McLuhan’s prediction was on target. An onslaught of mass media seemed indeed to be shrinking the globe into a single huge village. People were watching the same TV shows the world over, and even major metropolitan areas began to exhibit a dramatic visual sameness in their architecture. It seemed a foregone conclusion that culture was to become a global melting pot and, moreover, a melting pot dominated by first-world media. Now however, the facts no longer seem to fit McLuhan’s observation. A newer wave of digital technologies typified by the Internet are proving to be as much a force for diversity as it is for sameness.

                                Prepared by: Cyrille Geronimo and Jasmine Morona