Professor McLuhan is memorialized for his phrase 'the medium is the message,' implying his conviction that it was the way people received information that mattered just as much or even more than the actual information itself. By implementing machine learning, we get assistance from market forecasting and electronic trading to anticipating when a walkway is likely to crash.īut just as he has been lauded for his forecasts of the revolutionary advent of the internet, he must be acknowledged in his distressing warnings as to what it might be used for. In fact, computers are helping us today with literally everything. While the development of the internet can technically be traced back to 1958, it still seems impossible that anyone could foresee the popularity of connected devices and public WiFi networks that can be found everywhere in this day and age. 'A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.' 'The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment,' McLuhan wrote in 1962. McLuhan assumed that this new frontier would be the home of what he called the 'global village' - a space where technology would distribute knowledge to everyone and everything. In this novel, he suggested that human history could be divided into four different chapters: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the new electronic age. In 1962, McLuhan published a novel called The Gutenberg Galaxy.

In 1962, the author, professor and media theorist made the prediction that we would have the internet.

Marshall McLuhan did not exactly foresee it either, but he came closer than anyone to understanding our current technology-driven world. Several of their other theories bordered on the bizarre. The 20th-century futurists were susceptible to making some incredible predictions.Ģ020 is already shaping up to be a hugely pivotal year, but now that we’re here we can look back and easily see just how inaccurate several predictions turned out to be.įor instance, some theorists believed that we would be able to extend our lifespan to a hundred and fifty years, work drastically shorter hours each week, and operate private planes from our homes.

Mcluhan understanding media