Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher of communication theory, famously used the term “global village” to describe the effect of connected media upon the world’s population; it has become overused, but Cheok believes that new sensory-communication channels will demonstrate how prescient that prediction was. “For most of human history, we didn’t have privacy,” he says. “Everyone knew who was doing what. And these developments will mean that we become more and more open – the end of secrecy, almost bringing us back to the way that life used to be in hunter-gatherer times. Except, of course, it’s now global. A lot more people will know.”
