Let’s flashback to the year 1983.

If you were alive, you probably remember everybody rocking shoulder pads and listening to The Police. But it was also a significant year in the history of communication. 1983 marked the official birth of the Internet.

Granted, little did anyone know then what an integral part the Internet would play in our daily lives today.

Or did they?

One Canadian philosopher might have predicted the rise of the Internet decades before anyone else did, all the way back in 1962. And his name was Marshall McLuhan.

One of McLuhan’s central ideas was the concept of a “global village,” or a connected worldwide social and informational system that would form through the rise of electronic media. While this concept was met with vehement criticism in the ‘60s, it has seen a renewed interest in the past couple decades. With the age of the Internet, a global social order actually has come to fruition.

Still, a controversy among communication theorists remains. Did McLuhan really predict the Internet? Or was his theory of a global village merely coincidental?

A look at the philosopher’s other teachings may give us more of an answer.

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In addition to the global village concept, Marshall McLuhan preached the idea of technological determinism, in which social organization is determined by the predominant communication medium in a culture at a given time. This was a particularly strong idea of McLuhan’s, as communication methods do indeed seem to play a role in social structures.

For instance, think about the rise of the telephone as a mode of communication. For the first time ever, people were able to talk to friends and family members from miles away in real-time. This drastically changed the way we related to our social connections.

Today, social media has again changed how we communicate with one another and structure our personal worlds. The ability to connect instantaneously with anyone in the world via text, audio, or video (and subsequently retrieve those messages at a later time) is remarkable. It has revolutionized social organization and allowed us to build vast networks of connections beyond the boundaries of geographical location.

Another aspect of McLuhan’s ideas that hits the mark is the way that he talks about communication in terms of environment and context. This is a big difference (and an improvement, in my opinion) from some of the psychological perspectives that were popular in McLuhan’s time. While theorists like Schramm and Osgood focused on the role of individual thought processes on communication, McLuhan asserted that media were the extensions of man. Therefore, he recognized how different media change the ways in which people take in sensory information, understand their environment, and relate to one another.

Check out the short video below for a deeper explanation of McLuhan’s “extensions of man” proposal.

While McLuhan contributed a lot to the field of communication study, not everyone was on board with what he had to say, especially in the ‘60s. Many of his ideas were at best confusing and at worst completely bogus. And this doesn’t help the case of proponents who believe that McLuhan truly did predict the Internet.

One major weakness of McLuhan’s hypotheses was his claim that “the medium is the message.” Essentially, this idea stated that the content of a message didn’t have any effect on its audience. The method by which the message was communicated was the only thing that mattered.

However, I can think of several instances where message substance does in fact matter. Perhaps the most obvious example is the job of any advertiser, branding expert, or content marketer, honing their message to have an effect on a particular audience. Many of McLuhan’s critics noted that to discount a message’s content was to ignore the entire purpose of communication.

Furthermore, the details behind some of McLuhan’s principles were not always clearly based in fact. Interestingly enough, McLuhan once said in an interview that “clear prose indicates the absence of thought” (Jacobs, 2011, para. 6).

To provide an example, let’s look at McLuhan’s 1964 report, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. One of its main themes was that media could be divided into “hot” and “cool” methods, which he explained in terms of the difference between a telephone and a radio. The radio, he claimed, was a hot medium, meaning it was well filled with data. On the other hand, the telephone was a cool medium because it offered the ear less information. If you ask me, anyone with an ounce of logic would say that this distinction is unscientific and makes no sense.

Third, McLuhan inadequately outlined the history of communication in terms of just three paradigms: tribal, print, and electronic. Some scholars consider these paradigms to be too simple and restrictive, as communication has been a part of life since humans came into existence. They argue that three communication eras can hardly do the entire history of humanity justice. There are at least transition times between the eras, like the slow shift from print-based news to radio and television news, that McLuhan should have taken into account.

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When all is said and done, I personally don’t believe that Marshall McLuhan predicted the Internet; at least not in the way that we use it today. Too many of his ideas were flawed, based in opinion rather than fact, or failed to consider the importance of message content.

However, his idea of the global village does have merit in the sense that it accurately described the effects of globalization on social organization. And it did so before globalization took full shape.

Psychic or not, Marshall McLuhan’s ideas advanced the study of communication, particularly our understanding of the impact of electronic communication on social structure. But unfortunately, nobody realized just how much until 50 years after his time.