McLuhan’s second best known insight is summarized in the expression “the medium is the message”, which means that the qualities of a medium have as much effect as the information it transmits. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.“ Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone.

We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. One of the earliest thinkers along this line was Nicolas Tesla, who in an interview with Colliers magazine in 1926 stated: “ When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. While McLuhan popularized this concept, he was not the first to think about the unifying effects of communication technology. McLuhan chose the insightful phrase “global village” to highlight his observation that an electronic nervous system (the media) was rapidly integrating the planet - events in one part of the world could be experienced fromother parts in real-time, which is what human experience was like when we lived in small villages.

His insights were revolutionary at the time, and fundamentally changed how everyone has thought about media, technology, and communications ever since.

Marshall McLuhan was the first person to popularize the concept of a global village and to consider its social effects. Marshall McLuhan predicted the global village, one world interconnected by an electronic nervous system, making it part of our popular culture decades before the first DSL lines were installed. – Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.

Mcluhan 1964