A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Today, the instantaneous world of electric informational media is a brand new world of “all-at-onceness.” Time, in a sense, has ceased and space has vanished. Like primitives we live now in a “global village” of our own making, a simultaneous happening. The global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It is created by instant electronic information movement. The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as the little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose into everybody else’s business. The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony; you have extreme concern with every else’s business and much involvement in everybody else’s life. It’s a sort of Ann Landers column written larger. And it doesn’t necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else’s affairs. And so, the global village is as big as a planet and as small as the village post office.
“A McLuhan Montage,” in School Library Journal, April, 1967, p 39
Year: 1967
Chapter: Simultaneity
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan