Gaëten Tremblay, in his article titled “From Marshall McLuhan to Harold Innis, or From the Global Village to the World Empire” discusses how both of these mentioned theorists provide insight into the role of communication media in the organization of societies and the shaping of everyday life. Tremblay details the importance of McLuhan and Innis’ contributions in the understanding of modern society, insofar that it was shaped by changes in the areas of information dissemination and communication. While Tremblay respectfully outlines the impact of these pioneering thinkers, he takes issue with the validity of several ideas presented. Particularly, the author feels that McLuhan’s “Global Village” is a poor, misleading metaphor for the globalization
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This point is further developed by putting the theories of McLuhan and Innis in a contemporary context to see if they still hold true. It would seem that Tremblay is attempting here to raise questions about the importance of these theorists’ ideas in modern communication studies, especially that of McLuhan, who is “by far the best-known and most cited Canadian author in the world” (Tremblay 561). Perhaps the author would prefer if Marshall McLuhan were to be to communication studies as Sigmund Freud is to psychology; revered for his pioneering work and bringing his area of study into the academic forefront, but whose theories are for the most part seen as flawed at …show more content…
For instance, his criticism that globalization takes place primarily among major world cities, to the exclusion of rural areas. Here, I feel that the author does not consider the importance of scale to the metaphor. Yes, in a typical village everyone knows one another and there is little exclusion; however, in a global village, one can comfortably assume that entire counties, states, or blocs could be thought of as equivalent to the conventional individual in a village, because of the scale of globalism. The urban areas participating in mass international communication represent the greater surrounding rural areas on the scale of the global village. Villages have members of more prominence than the majority, as does the global village. Moreover, the author dismisses the importance of interconnectedness within the globalized world in favour of focusing on interdependence. Tremblay is correct in saying that the division of labour is more elaborate in cities than villages, but the interconnectedness of communication in a village would be much higher. Consider the following: who is more likely to have personally interacted with the greater percentage of people in their respective settlement, the villager, or the city-dweller? Surely the
This point is further developed by putting the theories of McLuhan and Innis in a contemporary context to see if they still hold true. It would seem that Tremblay is attempting here to raise questions about the importance of these theorists’ ideas in modern communication studies, especially that of McLuhan, who is “by far the best-known and most cited Canadian author in the world” (Tremblay 561). Perhaps the author would prefer if Marshall McLuhan were to be to communication studies as Sigmund Freud is to psychology; revered for his pioneering work and bringing his area of study into the academic forefront, but whose theories are for the most part seen as flawed at …show more content…
For instance, his criticism that globalization takes place primarily among major world cities, to the exclusion of rural areas. Here, I feel that the author does not consider the importance of scale to the metaphor. Yes, in a typical village everyone knows one another and there is little exclusion; however, in a global village, one can comfortably assume that entire counties, states, or blocs could be thought of as equivalent to the conventional individual in a village, because of the scale of globalism. The urban areas participating in mass international communication represent the greater surrounding rural areas on the scale of the global village. Villages have members of more prominence than the majority, as does the global village. Moreover, the author dismisses the importance of interconnectedness within the globalized world in favour of focusing on interdependence. Tremblay is correct in saying that the division of labour is more elaborate in cities than villages, but the interconnectedness of communication in a village would be much higher. Consider the following: who is more likely to have personally interacted with the greater percentage of people in their respective settlement, the villager, or the city-dweller? Surely the