McLuhan’s more optimistic musings about the psychic effects of television, computers, and sophisticated telecommunications media, coupled with his ideas about the retribalizing effects of electronic media, led him to posit the existence of a “global village.” In an interview published in Playboy magazine in 1969, he noted that he saw the reconfigured world environment emerging as a result of humankind’s increasingly intense interaction with electronic media as one in which “the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos.”

Contemporary critics dispel McLuhan’s vision of the global village as seriously off the mark. Rather than open up the world and improve the interactions of those within it, they point out that the rise of “one-world pop-tech civilization” has done exactly the opposite. As a Village Voice article noted, the cybernatization of media

has offered people the opportunity to pack themselves into ever smaller worlds, where enthusiasms mutate into obsessions, and a reality check is a parallel dimensions away.

However, even McLuhan realized that his utopian vision, with its “depth-structured” global citizens, came at a price:

“There is more diversity, less conformity under a single roof in any family than there is with the thousands of families in the same city. The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points. It never occurred to me that uniformity and tranquility were the properties of the global village.… The tribal-global village is far more divisive—full of fighting—than any nationalism ever was. Village is fission, not fusion, in depth.… The village is not the place to find ideal peace and harmony. Exact opposite.” (from “A Dialogue: Q & A” in Gerald E. Stearn, ed., McLuhan Hot and Cool)

Nothing that the nationalism created by the advent of print media provided an extraordinary relief from the conditions of feudalism and tribalism that preceded it, McLuhan maintained that he viewed the violent social upheavals and renewed inter-tribal conflicts of the global village “with total personal dislike and dissatisfaction.”

McLuhan:

I don’t approve of the global village. I say we live in it.

Hmmmm, maybe it’s a nice place to visit...