Media ecologist Neil Postman once remarked that "A medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture's politics, social organization, and habitual ways of thinking." To what extent has the current "new media" (TV, print, and social and Internet media) created a common globalized media environment and culture?

If one thinks of media in their everyday life, patterns emerge that validate the late Neil Postman's hypothesis--we all have heard variations on the following: "Have you got Facebook?"; "all the news sites are saying ..."; and the ubiquitous "have you heard about so-and-so in the blogs?" Superficially, these examples seem like banal excesses of a leisurely culture with an overabundance of free time to spend on entertainment. However, probing further, it underpins a certain truth that Postman and his colleagues in the Media Ecology Association and scholars frequently cite--that new media technologies do not just add to a culture, they transform it completely. In doing so, the old ways can only be comprehended in what Marshall McLuhan called "the rear-view mirror." Throughout the history of our species, humans have sought to "conquer time and space through speech, art and architecture, through writing and printing, and through various forms of transportation." (1) Through humanity's advancement through technology, we have also made vast changes that have had global repercussions.

In the nineteenth century, the Western world, at the very least, gained access to instantaneous communication technology: the telegraph, the first ever electronic (electrically powered) method of telecommunications. This evolved and expanded with the invention of the telephone, fax machines, radio, television, and innovations such as copper and fiber-optic cable, and satellite communication--all part of the pre-computer mediated communication (CMC) revolution carried over into the "new" media culture that forms an integral part of our modern experience. (2) In the late 1980s, personal computing became more affordable and with it, telecommunications were integrated with this new technology. From this watershed, French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul proposed that the convergence of media and communication technologies (print, video, audio, and telegraph) on the computer has

... set up networks in society that have nothing whatever to do with ancient networks or traditional structures ... We cannot continue as before. Simply because the computer is there, we cannot ignore it. When the railroad and the automobile came on the scene, those who wanted could still travel by horseback. But now there is no choice. A businessman cannot acquire a computer just because he likes progress. The computer brings a whole system with it ... the technical system has become strongly integrated ... offices, means of distribution, personnel must all be adapted to it. (3)

The computer has penetrated the lives of almost all people on the planet, arranging them into an interconnected, "retribalized human community within which sight and sound are global in extent," as media scholar Marshall McLuhan noted, which he termed the "global village." The mediation "space" is often now referred to as "cyberspace." (4)...