Global village - Definition and Overview

Global village is a term, coined by Marshall McLuhan in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, describing the trend of electronic mass media collapsing space and time barriers in human communication to enable people to communicate on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media. Today, the global village is mostly used as a metaphor to describe the Internet and World Wide Web. The Internet globalizes communication by allowing users from around the world to connect with each other. Similarly, web-connected computers enable people to link their web sites together.