Marshall McLuhan

World Wide Web invention predicted by Herbert Media guru, 30 years before its existence

Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian professor, philosopher and public intellectual was universally regarded as the father of communication and media studies.

Visionary Marshall McLuhan’s centennial celebration highlights his eloquent introduction lays out just a precis of the insights to “ the first seer of cyberspace”.

Thirty years before the World Wide Web was invented, Marshall McLuhan predicted the web technology we have today, as well as its impact.  He said “ Human history could be divided into four major communications eras the acoustic age, essentially that of oral tradition, the literary age, which begins with the invention of writing, the print age, beginning with the invention of the printing press, and the electronic age, the dissemination of information through computers.

In his 1962 book “ The Gutenberg Galaxy,” or “global village”, he describes how the world has been contracted into a village by electric technology. In that book, he prophesied the web technology we have today- a medium that didn’t exist until a decade after his death.

He said, “ A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopaedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of saleable kind.”

Marshall McLuhan quotes

“ We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us”.

“The spoken word as the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way”.

“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour”.

“In this electronic age, we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness”.

“Diaper backwards spells repaid. Think about it”.

“Money is poor man’s credit card”.

“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not on the battlefields of Vietnam”.

“We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror”.

“ The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare”.

“Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, is the interval”.

“If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch”.