• We can now scoot away to another channel without having to get up, turn a dial and adjust the rabbit ears. DVRs liberate us even more profoundly from the narrative trance.

• We can pause, go back and forward. The storyteller no longer calls all the shots.

• We can now scoot away to another channel without having to get up, turn a dial and adjust the rabbit ears. DVRs liberate us even more profoundly from the narrative trance. We can pause, go back and forward. The storyteller no longer calls all the shots.

• Video games are more consonant with the digital experience. Instead of being conveyed through a story by a narrator (as in a book), the player directs his or her own experience through a world. In a massively networked game, like World of Warcraft, there's no beginning, middle or end. Players don't play to "win" -- there's no such thing. They play for the pure fun of it. The object of the game is to keep the game going.

• Even books have taken on this quality of game culture, where fans of a certain series go to websites where they write their own "fan fiction" and add on to the universe of the original books. This, too, is more like a video game or a "fantasy role playing" game than it is like traditional narrative fiction. The original narrative may get broken, but everyone participates in a new kind of story.

A narrative is really just the story we use to understand something. It's a pathway through time: this happened, then this happened, and then . . . It's a great way to convey meaning and values

A culture in which private persons (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers.

With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others

With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).

producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan video making, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).

working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).

McLuhan described how the globe has been contracted into a village by electric technology and the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time.

• The world considered as a single community linked by telecommunications

• On the Internet, physical distance is even less of a hindrance to the real-time communicative activities of people, and therefore social spheres are greatly expanded by the openness of the web and the ease at which people can search for online communities and interact with others who share the same interests and concerns. Therefore, this technology fosters the idea of a conglomerate yet unified global community.

• Global Village ensures maximal disagreement on all points because it creates more discontinuity and division and diversity under the increase of the village conditions.

• McLuhan did not foresee the Global Village as a tool for uniformity and tranquillity

The rapidly increasing worldwide integration and interdependence of societies and cultures. A worldwide diffusion of practices, relations, and forms of social organization and the growth of global consciousness.

• The beginning of global communication through different media like television and the Internet

"imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and the like and their desire, indeed need, to impose themselves on various geographic areas”.

It involves three motor forces: capitalism, McDonaldization, and Americanization. Grobalization creates a world where:

Things are more homogenous and ubiquitous.

Larger forces overwhelm the power of people to adapt and innovate in ways that preserve their autonomy.

Social processes are coercive, determining the nature of local communities, which have little room to maneuver.

Consumer goods and the media are key forces that largely dictate the nature of the self and the groups a person joins.

when a culture adopts the characteristics of a fast-food restaurant. McDonaldization can be summarized as the way in which "the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world.

objective should be quantifiable (e.g., sales) rather than subjective (e.g., taste).

No matter where a person goes, they will receive the same service and receive the same product every time

standardized and uniform employees, replacement of human by non-human technologies