DIGITAL PROPHET
Who was Marshall McLuhan? Google Doodle marks 106th birthday of the
Canadian man who ‘predicted the internet’
21
July 2017
The Sun
by:
Sam Webb
He was one of the 20th century's most important
thinkers on media and the way it affects humanity
Herbert
Marshall McLuhan was born in July 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and died
on December 31, 1980.
He
was a professor, philosopher, intellectual and writer and has influenced
everything from journalism to advertising to the arts.
After
writing The Mechanical Bride, a critique of the world of advertising, and The
Gutenberg Galaxy, which laid out how printing changed Western civilisation, he
published Understanding Media.
The
book deals with technology and media and how it affects the way people think.
His
famous phrase “the medium is the message” means the way we try to convey a
message influences the way any message is understood – and in some ways is more
important than the message itself.
For
example, a TV news report about a horrifying crime may be less about the news
story itself than the way the news report affects how the public perceives
crime because it has been brought into their home via TV.
Did Marshal McLuhan
predict the internet?
Almost
30 years before the internet was born, his book The Gutenberg Galaxy prophesied
the web technology seen today.
He wrote: “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.
“A computer as a research and
communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library
organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a
private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”
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