Global Village

Monday, 09 May 2011 02:59

Written by Neric Acosta

The Canadian social theorist and scholar, Marshall McLuhan, called it the ‘global village’ – the collective sense of identity and common humanity, transcending barriers of race, creed, and culture. When McLuhan, who also made famous the aphorism “the medium is the message,” referred to increasing linkages across countries through mass media, the television age was yet at its infancy in the 1960s. But in one of his last works before his death in 1962, McLuhan predicted the increasing and widespread reach of media technologies, even presaging the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

This past week, the global village could not have been more manifest than three earth-shaking events, as it were, that had millions of people across the world agog with anticipation and interest. The royal wedding of Prince William and commoner Kate Middleton on April 29 was reportedly witnessed on live television by over two billion people and covered by thousands of media outfits and journalists who camped out in London for days prior to what was dubbed “the wedding of the century.”

Then the following day, Vatican put on its own show for a global audience of pilgrims and adherents to the Catholic faith with the beatification of the late Pope John Paul II. For a predominantly Catholic country like the Philippines, mass media went on full throttle for the coverage of the rituals and ceremonies surrounding the beatification of ‘John Paul the Great,’ a step away from canonization for sainthood.

In a modern age of greater individual freedoms and democracies one wonders about the fascination with and staying power of centuries-old institutions like the British monarchy. Media’s fixation with the royal wedding – down to the fine details of the bride’s wedding gown and wedding cake – surely fueled the hoopla and public hysteria of sorts. But this created the public spaces where TV and social media became, as McLuhan would have it, the ‘message’ itself – friends across continents on sharing and uploading photos and endless streams of commentaries on Facebook and blogs on the wedding details, making the cyberspace of information and interaction the ‘content and substance’ of data and information itself.

On May 2, media wires worldwide and the Internet exploded with the breaking news of the capture and death of the mastermind of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden. Crowds across America erupted in spontaneous jubilation, sending images of flag-waving, patriotic celebrations in New York and Washington, DC, where hundreds were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in September 2011. In minutes all corners of the world was connected by the stream of news feeds and footage of the special operations launched by US forces, and monitored closely by no less than President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The key institutions of one of the longest-reigning monarchies in the world, one of the largest organized religions in the world, and the strongest military power on earth executing a war-on-terror strategy played out on the global arena for billions to witness or vicariously participate in. Real time news in conventional and new media made their way to the immediacy of living rooms, offices, IPads and Blackberry devices. Such is the world we live in: real-time, borderless, instantaneous witnessing of history-changing events, hyper-connectivity in a digital age.

How all of these will evolve in the next decade will surely reshape how governments make decisions, or how businesses invest, how communities organize themselves. We are at still at awe at the kind of democratic spaces that were created by youth activists and professionals who maximized social media and the tools of Facebook and Twitter to usher in – at great cost – democracy in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and many other parts of North Africa and the Middle East.

The energies unleashed by technologies or channeled by their ever-innovative mechanisms of communication are exponential. And while these may be used for ill or exploitative ends – the export of terrorism or the rise of human trafficking and cross-border drug trade owe just as much to the use of online planning and plotting – the inhabitants of one planet have much to work with for the common good. When climate change policy initiatives, and technology transfer for cleaner energy sources, or equitable economic progress and humanitarian outreach are pursued, the wonders of modern age connectivity – the vast global village – open up limitless possibilities for cooperation and collaboration. And this can be done, as they are being done, often beyond government to government, state to state, or corporation to corporation initiatives. It is the people to people exchanges, the realm of interpersonal connections that are not bound by the confines of culture or custom, in a universe as porous as the Internet that will drive in ways large and small human cooperation and solidarity.

If there was underlying thread in the three momentous, media-saturated events of the world in the last week, it was the spirit of returning to the myriad strains of human experience of sharing joy for youth and marriage, celebrating milestones, affirming belief and faith systems, and embracing aspirations for security or seeking justice. We are denizens in an increasingly complex, populous world that forces us to expand and yet simplify as ‘global villagers.’

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