A global village century with Among the most influential ideas of the d half of the twentieth namely second respect to globalization was that of Canadian literary critic Marshall McLuhan, were the lobal village This concept has entered the popular imagination in ways that "g been central in the evolution of a popular probably not intended by the author and has were global consciousness. After the Second World War critics noted that social relations extending greatly over space due to the evolution communications technology, some of which had been advanced during the war of the effort. In the 1960s, McLuhan captured essence of this and coined the term arguing that "the worl as become compressed an ld electrically contracted, so that the glob more than one village Although often is no employed in a simplistic manner subsequently McLuhan's original concept was complex. principally to the evolution of social relations and the cultural in It referred used based to communicate these over time. Human history was divided into three phases on the dominant mode of communication: Oral Writing painting Electronic over time, argued McLuhan, each phase had been superseded by another mode and this had spatial ramifications. ral communication, by definition, restricted social interaction to relatively short distances, for example, within villages. The advent of writing and painting made the transport of ideas and cultural markers across space a lot easier leading to an increase in the 'extensibility' of human relations. The arrival of the electronic age and the even greater stretching of social relations had the paradoxical effect of once again making oral communication more common. This mode echoed the first period but this time the village was stretched globally. In the introduction to Understanding Media an sums this up: 'today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned'