McLuhan Could Have Predicted Wikileaks
by Gerald Trites

When Marshall McLuhan published The Gutenburg Galaxy in 1962 and Understanding Media in 1964, the World Wide Web hadn't yet been invented. The steps leading to the early development of the internet, such as the formation of ARPA, had been taken, but the internet was still a gleam in the eyes of some in the US defence department and a few academics. The World Wide Web was not yet invented. Tim Berners-Lee was only seven years old in 1962.

But the seeds of both the Net and the WWW had already been sown, and McLuhan understood that and of course his books and ideas struck a chord around the world. The new electric world would make possible the sharing of information instantaneously and globally. And so he coined the phrase The Global Village. Later on, some of his critics persuaded him to change the phrase to The Global Theatre, because the new world of global information exchange would be so much larger and more diverse than a village.

We all know that a village is a small compact unit with fast exchange of information. Everyone knows everyone else's business and there are very few secrets. Since the advent of the World Wide Web as a global force, we have seen the information flowing around the world. The Web itself now contains immeasurable quantities of information available globally. Google, as an example, has launched a number of initiatives through its publications programs and others that make information available globally that was previously not widely available. Social networks like Facebook make information about us available to others. We can think of many examples.

But it was not until the recent revelations put out by Wikileaks that we were truly drawn into the world of a Global Village. It became immediately apparent that the old rules about secrets - even sensitive state secrets - may not be sustainable. True the legal system still supports the old realm, but then laws can be changed and no doubt they will over time. Even if Wikileaks is eventually forced to shut down, which seems unlikely, the die is cast and there will be no shortage of successors.

As with the small villages of the world, in the Global Village there can be very few secrets. McLuhan was right on the money.