On July 21, 1911, a Edmonton, in Canada, nasce Marshall McLuhan, who for many is the philosopher (and sociologist) who predicted the Internet (and its dangers). You can find this statement online in many articles, but often the sources indicated are confused or even wrong and this has led some to say that no McLuhan did not predict the Internet, at least not exactly.
The facts, or in this case, the studies, date back to 1962. Not even a shadow of the Internet around. Seven years later there will be the first, historic connection of two computers via a network that was called the Arpanet at the time. In short, television was the means of mass communication with which the world had to deal. In 1961 in Italy, Umberto Eco had published an essay that was remarkably successful, Mike Bongiorno’s Phenomenology. And the following year McLuhan, 41, publishes The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he states that the history of mankind can be distinguished into four stages: the acoustic age, the literary age, the printing age and the electronic age. The latter will create a global village, an expression then cited an infinite number of times to describe the relationships created by social networks.
The global village, McLuhan argues, will be a space where technology will distribute knowledge to each and every thing. A passage that for many is equivalent to the prophecy of the advent of the Internet (speaking of a sociologist, more than a prophecy of an advent, I would speak of a forecast of a revolution). In another passage we speak of “a new means of communication that will incorporate television as content” and of “computers that will be a research and communication tool”(This step is actually amazing, because personal computers were very distant in time).
21st July 2017 Google celebrated the 106th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth with a doodle showing his theory of the 4 eras of humanity, motivated thus: “Long before we started looking at our screens in search of the answers, Marshall McLuhan saw the advent of the Internet and he predicted the impact it would have … At the heart of his thinking was the idea that society is shaped by technology and the way information is shared ”.
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