Our Global Village

A while back (actually too long than I care to think) I wrote my degree dissertation on the distention of technology within modern society; examining it’s impact, state and future. My examination was in part to technology as a whole, but in the majority it was focused on the internet and it’s rapid evolution and uptake in society.

One of the most poignant references in my work was to Marshall McLuhan‘s work. I recall being fascinated by his idea and discussion of the “Global Village”: How the world has shrunk through advent of communication and transport technologies. Allowing societies to traverse distances or time, without the constraints or considerations of previous generations. His work, to me, seemed to echo not only the evolutionary movement of technology as a whole, but very specifically that of the web and related social trends.

A few years after my graduation Facebook arrived on the scene, surpassing all previous efforts (MySpace, Friends Reunited) and really hammering home the claustrophobia of the modern, digital world. Other technologies quickly followed suit: cloud computing, the iPhone, public open Wi-Fi, cheap GPRS. To a point where information is not just at your fingertips, it’s in your pocket, plugged into your ears, quietly following you down the road via satellite streams.

Now, of course, this doesn’t sound like a bad thing. Amazon, Google and Facebook certainly wouldn’t want you thinking so either. Your friends are always there to chat when you need them, you can lookup the state of your finances on the way to work, via your iPhone, even make a few new friends via your out-of-body experience on Second Life. In fact life’s dandy for us information rich folk. But some of the arguments McLuhan made in both Global Village and Medium is the Message – which formed the core of my dissertation – seem to ring more loudly now than ever before.

To me, our increasing technological consumption, whilst decreasing the property of time, has substantially increased our abstraction from the physical world. The news regularly reports cases of online social events spilling, badly, into the real world. Marriages existing in Second Life, but failing in the real world, people being fired for status messages, even murders caused via state changes online. And these are almost always due to the inherent discontinuities between online and the real.

Don’t get me wrong, I think technologies like Google Latitude, Second Life, and all the others, are pioneers of the medium. But society needs to examine and learn from the digital mistakes we make now, rather than chasing the biggest cash or personal advancement. And I do wonder what mistakes will be made before we learn what to do with it all. The massive impact of technological contraction has already been felt on the financial world, and I can only wonder if increasing levels of youth crime can be, in-part, blamed on the increased social online activity of the younger generations and the removal of control/moderation/mentoring on such social platforms.

I think the next decade will be a very interesting one, but I for one, will be taking all these technologies with a substantial pinch of salt.