Our global village

The term 'global village' goes right back to the early 1960s, when it was coined by the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

The term describes the phenomenon of the world becoming ever more interconnected as the result media technologies spreading around the world. We are now able to pick up a phone and speak to someone in Papua New Guinea or Mongolia just as easily as chatting to our neighbour down the road.

A lot of people don't really appreciate this. They are insular, believing, like Brexit supporters and AfD voters, that we can still stem the tide of globalisation and go back to some halcyon age where everyone knew everyone because most people never went further than their next largest town on market day and holidays abroad were only an option for the very wealthy. Kiwi fruits - or Chinese gooseberries as they were also called at first - were just as exotic as bananas were for children in Britain and Germany after World War II or East Germans after the Wall came down. Pineapples came from a tin. Pulled pork was unheard of. As was jackfruit and dragon fruit. And what's this? A mango? 

You'd be lucky if you ever got a radio station from Germany or France - and if you were that lucky, you'd have had to concentrate very hard to understand anything, what with all the interference.

Books, magazines and newspapers in foreign languages? Hah! I once asked WHSmith in my home area if they could order a German magazine for me. I waited for four weeks and then finally had my answer: no.

These days, we have almost unlimited options and yet it still hasn't sunk in to many people that we are living in a 'global village'.

However, I think this coronavirus might teach people just how interconnected we all are. Something that starts off in China, in a town that no-one had ever heard of before, has now killed 10 people in Britain and 19 people have the virus in Wales.

It that isn't a lesson in how we are all one big family on one small planet, then I don't know what is.