Today on the Google home page is a special Google logo, aka Doodle, for Marshall McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan was a well-known Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual who specialized in media theory. He was credited for actually predicting the age of the Internet 30 years prior to the Internet becoming a thing.
He coined the term, "the medium is the message," which means the media influences how the message is perceived. Which is an interesting topic these days, since media is so disperse.
Google wrote:
Today’s Doodle, which celebrates the visionary’s 106th birthday, illustrates this theory by showing how McLuhan viewed human history. He saw it through the lens of 4 distinct eras: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the electronic age. His first major book, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), popularized the term “global village” — the idea that technology brings people together and allows everyone the same access to information.
The images in this Doodle from left to write symbolize the acoustic age, the written age, mass production, McLuhan television appearance, Global Village and electronic age.
He was born on July 21, 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and died 69 years later in Toronto. You can learn more about his life at Wikipedia.
Forum discussion at Google+.
