TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Google Doodle today honors the 106th birthday of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan who was born on July 21, 1911, in Edmonton, Canada, was a communication theorist and literary critic.

His most prominent theory was the global village and medium is the message. Above all, Marshall McLuhan was known for predicting the world wide web (WWW), 30 years before the internet.

Upon viewing Google page, users are presented with boxes containing communication symbols, from sound to fire to industry icon to writings to a television set showing McLuhan’s face. The symbols represent the stages before the internet inception.

According to McLuhan, the global village can be divided into four eras: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age and the electronic age. The theory was explained in the book titled The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), published during television’s early golden era.

In it, McLuhan explained that people are not only affected by media content but also formed by the characteristic of the media itself.

Marshall McLuhan died on December 31, 1980, at age 69.

AMRI MAHBUB