A Global Village

A Canadian writer and educator named Marshall McLuhan came up with the phrase, "the global village" to describe our world. What is a village?
"A small community where everyone knows each other" springs to mind. Perhaps the thought that each person in the community helps the village to survive and so everyone is dependent on each other applies. These are good descriptions of a village but could we say this about our world?
Physically our world is enormous. How can we all be connected to each other? In the last century, better transportation and communication have allowed people to be in contact with other parts of the world more quickly and more easily than ever before. The world is also connected through global resource use and a world economy. What is grown or made in Asia often is consumed in North America. The products of Europe are found in Australian stores. African produce is found in the kitchens of Europe. The global village, as McLuhan meant it, is an image that shows us to be connected to, and dependent on, other parts of the world. 7 Transportation In the last century, huge technological advances made travel much easier, enabling people to travel farther and more often than ever before.
The development of railways was an enormous leap forward from animal-drawn transportation.
Once the Canadian Pacific Railway was built in the 1880's, people as well as produce could travel across Canada, From coast to coast. It also vastly increased the flow of trade from Briti h Columbia to Britain, enabling BC to share the profits of
Anglo-Canadian trade. Furthermore, the CPR became a link in the transportation of goods from East Asia to Great Britain, as fast trans-Pacific ships brought goods to Vancouver, where they were loaded into freight cars to be taken to
Atlantic freighters and then on to Britain. This contributed greatly to the early growth of our city, until the completion of the Panama Canal allowed freighters to pass directly from one ocean to the other. Elsewhere in the world, a new generation of fast trains has proven efficient in moving people and goods quickly and efficiently. Japan's Shinkansen , or bullet trains, have proven their worth for decades. European high speed express trains sometimes allow people to move more rapidly across the continent by train, from downtown to downtown, than even plane travel allows. A good example of this is the Eurostar train, linking London and Paris via the Chunnel - a tunnel between England and France. What was once a journey of 8-10 hours by car or train and ferry or hovercraft, or commutes to and from downtown to airports plus a short flight that added up to 3 or more hours in total is now a train journey of roughly the same time as flying and taxing from downtown to downtown - but without the aggravation of horrific traffic jams and airport hassles. Unfortunately such trains have yet to be introduced to Canada, because our widespread population makes them uneconomical at this time. In North America the automobile is the preferred means of travel over short and medium distances.
When, in the 1920's, Henry Ford decided to make cars an item most people could afford, it led to a growth in highways and, consequently, mass tourism. Over the years, roadways have improved and so has technology related to this. The primitive dirt tracks that challenged earlier motorists have been replaced by paved, multi- lane, expressways and wooden trestles have given way to impressive steel and concrete bridges. The Confederation Bridge connecting Prince Edward Island to Nova Scotia is an example of how technology has changed people's mindset toward travel. Going to P.E.I. used to be thought of as an all-day excursion because of the hour ferry ride each way, but it now takes only 25 minutes, one way, on the bridge, making a half- day visit a possibility. 8 After a century of development , air travel is now the preferred means of long distance travel. It currently takes eight or nine hours to fly from
England to Vancouver, whereas one hundred years ago it would have taken several weeks to complete the same journey by boat and train. The speed of the Concorde supersonic airliner lets it to travel from London to New York in under three hours -actually allowing it to land at an earlier time in the day than it departed, because of the time difference between the two locations. On
December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000 a specially chartered Concorde circled the globe allowing its passengers to celebrate the millennium change several times as they flew westward, repeating midnight several times before returning home for much needed rest. While most of us have not experienced the thrill of supersonic air travel, an increasingly large percentage of the population flies from time to time and more and more of us use planes to visit distant places that our ancestors could only dream of seeing. On the seas a new industry has developed in addition to continuing freighter traffic, leading to more people experiencing more of the world. The cruise industry allows passengers to experience seven different countries in one week. This was never possible before and has brought our world closer together. A negative consequence of this and increased air travel is that Western culture has come to dominate other parts of the world. This will be discussed later. During the twentieth century, scientists initiated space travel Many nations poured money into space programs and the world became connected through our attempts to find out what lies beyond our planet. Initially countries were in competition, though now nations are co- operating with each other, helping to spread the huge costs around. Space experiments, further travel and maintenance of space stations are all areas where nations are working together.
Although these connections are between governments and big businesses, the public will soon be directly connected to space. The Rotary
Rocket Company is building a rocket that will become the first civilian spacecraft to put tourists into space . This is not only making our world smaller, but it is making areas beyond our world smaller. Communication The invention of television brought the world closer together because it broadcast news from around the world into our homes, and introduced programs from other countries as well as our own. Local differences in populations disappeared as we copied the ways of talking and acting that we saw on television. Of course the process actually began decades before as movies influenced generations of cinema audiences.
Television took this further, reaching a far wider audience, maintaining many more hours of contact with its viewers. 9 Over time this became increasingly internationalized as satellites enabled huge amounts of information to travel instantly around the globe. When we turn on our televisions, we see news beamed directly from anywhere from
Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Kids around the world can, and do, watch the same television shows and listen to the same music. Fashionable students in Japan and Australia may have similar tastes. There are still differences, of course, but few would deny that the world is being homogenized. Satellites not only allow us to receive radio and television stations from around the world, they also help us make international telephone calls. People spend an enormous amount of time in front of the television and by the time you graduate from high school you will have spent around 12,000 hours in school and as many as 15,000 hours in front of the TV. This might be changing, however, because of the Internet. The Internet can be a source of knowledge or entertainment. We can look up weather reports from around the world, research a topic, play video games , check the stock market , listen to a radio station from Brazil , send an email to a cousin in Holland, perhaps even having our words machine translated for us, or watch a TV program being aired in Florida. Currently in North America, there are 2,000 radio stations, which are live on the Internet. While television is a passive medium, the Internet allows us to interact with material on screen. The newest advance in this field is development of broadband connections for the home through cable access or the ADSL phone lines (which allow regular phone connections to take place while the internet is in use). While businesses with local area networks have used big bandwidth connections, like T1 lines for some time, this has not been economical for home users. Now cable and ADSL connections allow anyone almost instant loading of web pages. This speed allows us to load sites that are memory intensive, using large graphic files, sounds and even moving images - things that would take a long time to load on conventional dial-up modems.
Multimedia options vastly improve the Internet experiences of users and appear to be setting the direction of web page design for the future. Cable or ADSL connections are also always "on" and do not require preliminary login procedures.10 Although the Internet provides us with links to around the world, is it going global? It is estimated that by 2005 there will be one billion people logged onto the web, which is one-sixth of the world's population. However, developed countries use the Internet far more than developing nations and this is one more example of the growing gap between rich and poor countries. The United States and Canada are the top two countries in the world in terms of numbers of users. As Margorie Olster reported in the Vancouver Sun, "90 per cent of Internet host computers are in high-income countries with 16 per cent of the world's population. New York has more Internet hosts than all of Africa." While
Internet use is exploding around the world, its use is far from global. Cell phone technology is another technological advance that is impacting people all over the world and bringing them closer together. Cell phones enable people to be anywhere in the country and speak to friends and family while carrying their personal phone along with them. A person can be accessed whether at home or on the other side of the continent. The caller need not even be aware of the receiver's location. As with the Internet there are disparities between the rich and poor. Even among wealthier nations, some cultures have far more cellular phones in use than others. In Japan
88% of people in their twenties have a cell phone while in Canada the figure is much lower at 20%. Part of the reasons cell phones are so popular in Japan is that they do not pay per call and many are now buying palm held ones with internet access included. Not only can you phone people from anywhere in the country, you can also have Internet access anywhere. While this mobility extends nationally, it is not yet international in scope. To enable this, the International Telecommunication Union has been established as a committee by the United Nations which is to find agreement on a single wireless standard. Currently, North America has a different system from Europe, which is different from Asia.
If we achieve a common wireless server, a person could use their cell phone anywhere in the world!