global village

English

Etymology

Coined by Marshall McLuhan in 1962.

Noun

global village (plural global villages)

1. The world as a single community of interdependent inhabitants who are interconnected by contemporary technology, especially television and the World Wide Web.
   • 1962, Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press, →OCLC, page 31:

     But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous “field” in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a “global village.”

   • 1964 July 3, “Blowing Hot & Cold”, in Time‎, archived from the original on 19 June 2011:

     McLuhan believes that the world is rapidly becoming a "global village," in which mankind communicates in a supermodern version of the way tribal societies were once related.

   • 1982 December 4, Rob Kaplan, “Life in the Last Days”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 20, page 11:

     Because the novel is so rooted in time and place, some of the events seem a bit outdated. However, Mitchell draws such explicit connections between these events, gay liberation, feminism and leftist politics in general that the book rises above its setting to make very clear comments about the global village as it is today.

Translations

world as single community

Chinese: Mandarin: 地球村 (zh) (dìqiúcūn), 世界村 (zh) (shìjiècūn) Dutch: mondiaal dorp n Finnish: maailmankylä French: village global (fr) m German: globales Dorf n Greek: παγκόσμιο χωριό (el) n (pagkósmio chorió) Polish: globalna wioska (pl) f