The Electronic Age: The Rise of Global Age

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.

- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964.

It started with a device created by Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph and led to the telephone, the cell phone, television, internet, DVD, video games, etc. This ability to communicate instantly returned us to the tradition of sound and touch rather than sight. Being able to be in constant contact with the world becomes a nosy generation where everyone knows everyone's business and everyone's business is everyone else's.

McLuhan insisted that the electronic media retribalizing the human race. Electronic Media bring us in touch with everyone, everywhere, instantaneously. This age shows that feelings is more important than thinking.

What is the Global Village?

According to Wikipedia, the term global village represents the simplifying of the whole world into one village through the use of electronic media. Global village is also a term to express the constituting relationship between economics and other social sciences throughout the world. The term was coined by Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan,^[1]and popularized in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) McLuhan changed the way the world thought about media and technology ever since his use of the word in his book ^[2]. McLuhan described how electric technology has contracted the globe into a village^[3]because of the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time.^[4]

Because electrons are mostly invisible, our visualizations of them tell us more about our dreams than about electrons. This cool and unusual book gathers our earliest collective dreams about circuits and electronics, and makes them visible. It got me thinking about our assumptions for tomorrow. I love it when a book like this makes me see the world differently.
— Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants

People use technology to fit into a digital community to which they aren't physically connected, but mentally connected. Each social media platform acts as a digital home for individuals, allowing people to express themselves through the global village.

I encourage you to watch the clip below. It was from McLuhan as he talked about the Future of Health Technology.