I first heard the term ‘ global village ‘ a long time ago. Marshall McLuhan coined it in the 1960s, imagining an interconnected humanity all coming together via the tools of media technology. This was long before social media and the Internet.
When the Internet came along, then the Web, it seemed to reinforce this idea–we’d all be connected, sharing ideas and information instantly, coming together in one big, borderless, egalitarian community. The phrase ‘global village’ was everywhere. We were all now One, no longer constrained by the boundaries of place, geography, or time–or even who we were.
But that didn’t happen.