Introduction: Scale in the Global Village
One of the most important dimensions of scale in media is the process any medium or technology goes through as it scales up from small to large. For example, when only a handful of people in a society own a telephone, the telephone is a medium of little consequence. But when almost everyone owns a phone and uses it daily, the value and effect of the phone is enormous. That is the “network effect”—the value of a network increases exponentially as more people use it. Likewise, when only a few people in a society of millions own an automobile, the car is a novelty with little overall impact. But when millions own and regularly drive cars, the industry and infrastructure to support automobiles scales up correspondingly and the car comes to have a profound impact on personal habits, cultural patterns, and social arrangements.
Marshall McLuhan was one of the first media theorists to recognize the importance and consequence of scale in a medium or technology. He wrote in Understanding Media that the "personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”[1] McLuhan makes a similar point about scale when he writes: “For the ‘message’ of a medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”[2] McLuhan’s theory of scale can be seen in his idea of the “global village,” which suggests that electronic media collapse the world into a village where we are aware of what is going on all over the world, all the time. Our electronic technology has the paradoxical effect of both increasing and decreasing scale at the same time; in other words, electronic media result in an “implosion or interfusion of space and function,” which in turn results in an “instantaneous reassembling” of scattered bits into an “organic whole.”[3] Thus, large scales of experience (i.e., worldwide events such as revolutions, wars, or terrorist attacks) are collapsed into a small space for consumption via a connected technology such as a television, a computer, or a cell phone.