Nearly 30 years before the World Wide Web was invented, Marshall McLuhan predicted the web technology we have today, as well as its impact.
A Canadian philosopher and professor who specialized in media theory, McLuhan rose to prominence in the 1960s with his theory that society is shaped by technology and the way information is shared. Google's Doodle on Friday celebrates the visionary's 106th birthday by illustrating how McLuhan viewed human history.
For McLuhan, 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.
His 1962 book, "The Gutenberg Galaxy," popularized the term "global village," which 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.
