The Virtual Village: Marshall McLuhan in the Era of Oculus Rift

Are we entering the era of virtual citizenship?

Even if you have never heard about the Canadian philosopher and communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, odds are that you have heard of his concept of the "global village" and how technology brings us ever closer together through a concatenation of intertwined networks which fail to attribute for ethnicity, gender, and religion. In the era of a global Facebook hegemony, it is easy to forget about some of the other transformative social networks which innovated the field of virtual communication, such as Second Life. These networks had added one more dimension to our typical social media communication, as they included a virtual avatar of ourselves in a 3D-rendered environment. However, the experience was no more real than playing a typical PC or Mac game. The Oculus Rift and the Microsoft Hololens would be much more immersive than staring at a cold screen. Are we entering the era of virtual citizenship? Would we finally be enabled to live as a truly global cosmopolitan community without political and economic divides?