Abstract:
Marshall McLuhan's "global village", and his theories on communications and
technology, in conjunction with Patrick McGoohan's television series The Prisoner
(ATV, 1967-1968) are explored in this thesis. The Prisoner, brainchild of McGoohan, is
about the abduction and confinement of a British government agent imprisoned within
the impenetrable boundaries of a benign but totalitarian city -state called "The Village".
The purpose of his abduction and imprisonment is for the extraction of information
regarding his resignation as a government spy. Marshall McLuhan originally popularized
the phrase "the global village" in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making o/the Topographic
Man (1962), asserting that, "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in
the image of a global village" (p. 31). This thesis argues that valid parallels exist between
McGoohan's conception of "village", as manifested in The Prisoner, and McLuhan's
global village.
The comprehensive methodological stratagem for this thesis includes Marshall
McLuhan's "mosaic" approach, Mikhail Bakhtin's concept ofthe "chronotope", as well
as a Foucauldian genealogicallhistorical discourse analysis. In the process of
deconstructing McLuhan's texts and The Prisoner as products of the 1960s, an historical
"constellation" (to use Walter Benjamin's concept) of the same present has been
executed. By employing this synthesized methodology, conjunctions have been made
between McLuhan's theories and the series' main themes of bureaucracy as dictatorship,
the perversion of science and technology, freedom as illusion, and the individual in
opposition to the collective.
A thorough investigation of the global village and The Prisoner will determine
whether or not Marshall McLuhan and/or Patrick McGoohan visualize the village as an
enslaving technological reality.
