Around 30 years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, McLuhan wrote about a “global village” of humanity with equal access to information through technology. In other words, the internet.
“Decades later, we honour the man whose prophetic vision of the ‘computer as a research and communication instrument’ has undeniably become a reality,” Google said.
In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan described four distinct ages of humanity: acoustic, literary, print age and electronic.
Google has illustrated these four eras on the 106th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth.
Who was Marshall McLuhan?
Born Herbert Marshall McLuhan on July 21 1911, the Canadian studied for a Masters English at the University of Manitoba before enrolling at Cambridge.
After graduating with a PhD, McLuhan became a lecturer, and by the early 1950s was teaching at the University of Toronto.
While there he began writing The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (published 1962), a pioneering work which predicted that the world was entering a new age.
McLuhan proposed that history could be broken down into distinct eras: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the then-emerging electronic age.
He wrote about a “global village” which would give equal access to information through technology, removing global barriers to knowledge.
“The next medium, whatever it is it may be the extension of consciousness — will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form,” McLuhan explained.
“A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopaedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”
In his follow-up, Understanding Media, McLuhan evolved his thesis to discuss how the means of communication rather than the information itself would become the most important element of the electronic age.
He coined the phrase “The Medium is the Message”, which he expanded upon in a 1967 book of the same name.
Throughout the late 1960s, McLuhan became a regular fixture on television, often debating his theory that that the method of communicating scaled and controlled “the scale and form of human association and action”.
But his work proved controversial among academics throughout the 1970s, and after his death in 1980.
The invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 gratified McLuhan’s theories.
Today, billions of people have equal access to a wealth of knowledge, with the advent of smart phones transforming humanity’s relationship with information.
Daily Express :: Life and Style Feed
