Twitter Sociology

“I feel that we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world 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” (McLuhan 1969). In a 1969 interview for Playboy Magazine, media theorist Marshall McLuhan dreamt of a world where man was capable of individual thought, yet still linked seamlessly to the rest of the world through the media. This notion of a virtual community that breaks down the borders of time and space is what McLuhan coined as the “Global Village”. To analyze this concept in the modern world, it can be applied to Twitter, a social media website where users have the ability to post their thoughts within a 140-character …show more content…
Upon connecting the ideas of McLuhan to the patterns seen in Twitter, it can be determined that Twitter is not a viable Global Village, as the unification of individuals demonstrates a digital divide, segregation, and a loss of individuality due to tribalism. Firstly, Twitter represents how the Global Village is incomplete, as one’s access to the social media website can vary depending on their geographic location. In McLuhan’s 1967 Marfleet Lectures, he explains, “The same information is available at the same moment from every part of the world. Energy is available everywhere at once”. It is understood that McLuhan assumes that the Global Village, in which he believes we live in, consists of a universal access to information. McLuhan’s assumption fails to recognize how individuals receive unequal access to the media world, demonstrating a global “digital divide”. This divide is based on