Today’s Google doodle marks what would have been Marshall McLuhan’s 106th birthday.
A Canadian philosopher, professor and author, McLuhan was an astute media theorist with a prescient vision of how technology would continue to shape our world.
In 1962, McLuhan published “The Gutenberg Galaxy” — a book that popularized the term “global village” and the concept that technology unites people by giving everyone equal access to information.
Two years later, he published “Understanding Media,” where he coined the famous phrase, “The medium is the message.” In the 1964 book, McLuhan theorized that the way humans receive information is more important and influential on our history than the actual information being received.
The doodle leads to a search for “Marshall McLuhan” and includes an animated image of McLuhan on TV, along with images representing the four specific eras of human history as defined by the philosopher: the acoustic age, the written (or literary) age, the print age with mass production resources, and the global village/electronic age.
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Google says today’s doodle honors “… the man whose prophetic vision of the ‘computer as a research and communication instrument’ has undeniably become a reality.”
