The Mobile Village

Artman, N., Stiegler, Z.
15th Annual MEA Convention
June 2014, Toronto, Canada

One of Marshall McLuhan's most enduring concepts is that of "the global village." Introduced in 1962's The Gutenberg Galaxy, the concept accrued particular resonance with the advent of the Internet, as digital communications interconnected disparate cultures even more deeply than did broadcasting and the Electric Age of McLuhan's time.  

The primary undercurrent running throughout McLuhan's body of work is his fixation on the ways in which media technologies alter, create, and impact our cultural environment. He argues that  "All media or technologies [...] create new environments or habitats, which become the milieux for new species or technologies (McLuhan and Fiore (1968), p. 190). The revival enjoyed by McLuhan's work in the 1990s speaks to the point that like the technologies of the Electric Age, the Internet created a whole new environment that subsequently impacted social behaviors and relations. More recently, the Internet's structural shift driven by mobile technologies has again restructured our mediated environment. The rise of wireless connectivity, mobile networks, smartphones, laptops, and tablets raises further questions about the communicative dynamics of our increasingly interconnected world. The central question to our presentation today is how the introduction of mobile technology has impacted our shared global environment. More to the point, what are the ramifications of the global village's transformation into the mobile village? In addressing this question, we examine three key ways in which the Mobile Village has impacted our media environment: the obliteration of space, challenges to existing social norms, and the (creation) of a digital infoglut,. These are by no means the only consequences of the Mobile Village's development, but they are among the most significant in their reordering of communicative dynamics and social relations.