(i) Television is one of the most powerful communication media in a global village. It sends messages across thousands of miles almost instantly. As a result physical distance would no longer appear as a barrier, presenting or slowing down communication.
(ii) There are some similarities and some differences between the communications of the global village and an ordinary village.
(iii) While most people who live together in a village are farmers, there are obvious differences amongst rich landlords, small farmers, tenant cultivators, craftsmen, and landless agricultural labourers. In other words, people can be close to one another in physical terms, but be separated by social and economic distance. As the land-lord are more powerful they tend to dominate social, economic and cultural interaction in the village. So although communication may be direct, and face-to-face, it is at the same time influenced by the fact that those who participate in it are not equal in status.
(iv) This problem is aggravated even more in the global village. Here communication is dominated by people in cities. For example, on the average, city-dwellers are richer and more influential than those who live in villages. People living in the cities of USA are generally richer than those living in Indian cities, and it is usually powerful people in these cities of the developed countries who produce and beam out TV programmes, which we then receive.
(v) In the global village, although distances are overcome, communication becomes a one- day process. We can see and hear what is presented by the TV producers, but there is no genuine dialogue. So unlike face-to-face conversation in a small village, where we can discuss, interrupt, quarrel and make up, we simply receive the messages which flow to us from TV and often follow them. It is much more difficult to question or challenge what we are told.
