The global village

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1. StevenNunezJul 2026
   This is me. I hate it. I'm working though (ever so slowly) The Global Village by Marshall McLuhan and I really like the metaphor technology going from Visual to Acoustic. Put another way the past had a serial enforcement we don't have today with always-on connections and easy access to distractions.

   I've been trying to introduce more friction into my life to make doing harder things the right thing. 1. I have a rooted Orchid F1 flip phone with Telegram and Firefox focus. Telegram lets me TTS to an openclaw instance if I need to get something "out" but long interactions are awful with the small screen and latency. Firefox focus is also terrible in all the right ways. If I'm out and HAVE to search for something this is enough of a break glass solution but for the most part it's just calls and texts. 2. I carry an xteink x3 for books. I'm trying to read more so this being the only thing available has me reaching for it more than I'd normally do.

   I don't have a good solution for things at work yet. Maybe I'll start blocking all websites or doing strict pomodoros.

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2. user3939382Jan 2022
   Yep -- check out Marshall McLuhan & the Global Village, which he put out in the 60s. Very prescient.
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3. throw0101cMar 2023
   Also Marshall McLuhan (with references to earlier works, like Sapir 1933):

   * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_village

   Also this sounds prescient:

   > No chapter in Understanding Media, later books, contains the idea that the global village and the electronic media create unified communities. In an interview with Gerald Stearn,[16] McLuhan says that it never occurred to him that uniformity and tranquility were the properties of the global village. McLuhan argued that the global village ensures maximal disagreement on all points because it creates more discontinuity and division and diversity under the increase of the village conditions; the global village is far more diverse.

   * Ibid

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4. uncertain-phrNov 2022
   Marshall McLuhan came up with the concept of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_village, which may be relevant here.
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5. jamiequintDec 2007
   A good quote from an article I was recently reading (The Cultural Paradox of the Global Village - http://www.utoronto.ca/mcluhan/article_culturalparadox.htm)

   If attention is the most valuable commodity, our most valued asset, it may be said that the most valuable personal skill to be effective these days is ignorance, literally ignore-ance -- the ability to selectively and appropriately ignore that which is irrelevant or merely distracting. In this context, ignorance is not bliss -- it is the practical manifestation of acute awareness and heightened perception.

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