The Future of the Global Village in 2020
Group Members:
Introduction of "Global Village"
In the introduction to McLuhan's Understanding Media he writes: 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.
The basic precepts of his view are that the rapidity of communication through electric media echoes the speed of the senses. Through media such as the telephone, television and more recently the personal computer and the 'Internet', we are increasingly linked together across the globe.
He concludes we are forced to become aware of responsibilty on a global level rather than concerning ourselves solely with our own smaller communities. He writes: As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed at bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibilty to an intense degree.
Issues of the changing world
In this section we try to find some important issues emerge recently. Knowing these issues will be usefull to understand the present situation of the world in a global scale. When an issue emerge, how it emerge, who involve in the issue and the interaction between them are some key question we try to answer. We devide those issues into five general categories as follow:
List of Uncertainties
In the 1960s Marshal McLuhan pointed out how media could change humans and everything surrounding them. Media has a big influence on how we perceived the world. In his book "Medium is The Massage", he revealed "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village". How actually media will transform the world into the so called 'Global Village' and how we describe a global village? In this section we collected some questions related to uncertainties of the world in the future with regard to the idea of global village.
Research Questions
Based on uncertainties we found, we finally came to some key factors that have dominant influence to the uncertainties. By knowing those factors deepper we could understand how and why these factors so prominent and whether they can be considered as the driving forces to the future of the Global Village.
Driving Forces
Driving forces are prominent factors that drives the likelihood of an event to take place. In case of Global Village, we eventually concluded from our research that the 'Global Village' is an iceberg of some phenomena below.
- The Increasing Use of Internet
- The Future of TV
- Economics of scale
- The globalization of international trade
- The globalization of international finance
- The global production
- The international investment
- Medicine
- Media Globalization
System Diagram
In this system diagram we would show you how interactions of actors in a global scale look like. It tells us how media, internet, culture, international trades, etc. interact and influence each other. Why this interactions take place, what are the motives behind them, and which actors/entities have the most power to influence the others are extremly important questions to be explained in order to construct scenarios of the Global Village.
System Diagram: Low Level Details
This diagram shows the 'big picture' of the complex system diagram. It is aimed to give general sense of what is happening on the system in a broad scale.
The Scenarios