Let's all hear it for a great and enigmatic Canadian

Yesterday marked what would have been the 100^th birthday of possibly the most influential Canadian of our time. No Martha, it's not Wayne Gretzky, Celine Dionne or Pierre Trudeau. It's a Canadian that few Canadians understand. Nor does anyone else for that matter. But more than a generation ago, this Canadian predicted the world we'd be living in today and his prediction has come true with a vengeance.

Marshall McLuhan, the communication theorist whose groundbreaking 1964 book “Understanding Media” coined the famous expression “the medium is the message,” an idea that invokes great controversy even today and who also coined the expression “the global village,” predicting the advent of the world wide web 30 years before the web became a reality.

This alone should have been enough to win a Noble Prize but McLuhan was never so honoured quite possibly because most people, including some of the brightest minds in academia, just didn't get it when it came to his prescient and far-reaching ideas. And truth to say, I'm one of them even though I entered university a year after “Understanding Media” was first published and McLuhan's reputation was approaching its zenith. And it's only now, after almost 40 years in the media business, that I'm beginning to understand what the Great Man was getting at and quite frankly it frightens me in many ways especially when I look at the state of the world today.

As best as this technologically-challenged person can understand it, what McLuhan meant by “the medium is the message” is that the form (medium) by which the message is carried is often more important than the content of the message itself. On the surface, this appears somewhat nonsensical and deceptively simple, but when analyzed by minds greater than mine some extremely profound meaning results.

Look at it this way. If you could look through some great monitor or screen and see all the trillions of pieces of information circulating in cyberspace at any given nano-second much of it would be trivial, silly and of no consequence. In fact, it's often said the biggest batch of electro-magnetic “content” circulating on the Net is pornography though you couldn't prove it by me. Nevertheless, trivial or not, pornographic or not, who would deny that the Internet (the medium) is by far the biggest single influence on society today and changing it in ways that we can hardly imagine?

Without the Internet, there would be no social media, file sharing, instant messaging, email, music, movies and news “on demand.” Look at how this has changed our lives. Without the Internet and its accessories like cell phones, there would be no “Arab spring,” like the smart-phone led revolutions in Egypt and Libya and dictatorships like Syria would still be able to keep their people ignorant and compliant. Information is power and that power is now available to everyone with a battery and an iPhone.

McLuhan pointed out that every time a new technology is invented there are unforeseen consequences because people are much more interested in the technology itself than what it will ultimately do. A light bulb, he once said, was inert in itself, but by extending the human day and enabling people to work indoors at all hours, it changed the world.

In developing his ideas, McLuhan often relied on Harold Innis, another Canadian communication theorist and University of Toronto professor who said when we change our tools we change ourselves. A professor at Columbia University claims this is already happening with the Net, which people are relying on more and more to do their thinking for them instead of thinking for themselves. Psychologist Betsy Sparrow calls this the “Goggle Effect” and says search engines like Goggle and Yahoo are making us dumber and more dependent on our computers, smart phones, tablets and the like.

You have to wonder if McLuhan was alive today what he would think of the “Global Village” he predicted. Would he see it as a wonderful new world order where everyone was growing happier and wiser in a great, on-line, electronic gestalt or would he see it as a Brave New World of listless people devoid of individuality and incapable of original thought?

Whatever the case, this is one question that Goggle can't answer.