Marshall McLuhan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#The_global_village 
" print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence"  "


" The key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization "


" McLuhan coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson's 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution. "


http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/bas9401.html 


" we are increasingly linked together across the globe and this has enabled us to connect with people at the other side of the world as quickly as it takes us to contact and converse with those who inhabit the same physical space (i.e the people that live in the same village). "


" effect of this McLuhan suggests is a new ability to experience almost instantly the effects of our actions on a global scale, just as we can supposedly do in our physical situations. Consequently he concludes we are forced to become aware of responsibility on a global level rather than concerning ourselves solely with our own smaller communities "


"we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned "
http://itwofs.com/beastoftraal/2010/04/18/marshall-mcluhans-global-village-is-happening-now-finally/


"the printing era (book era) as the era of individual identity. Here we had a consumer (of information) and the medium. The role of the consumer is to consume alone – nothing else was technically possible, or whatever was possible was indeed possible in limited numbers and close circles. "


" the next era was the electronic era (television/ radio). This, McLuhan calls the shared tribal identity, where we have consumers consuming content from the medium, but not necessarily alone – it’s no wonder it was called ‘mass media’. "



"we created tribes around which we consumed content in homogeneous ways. Hence,

• consumer(s) <- medium media "