“We have given up an eye for an ear”: did Marshall McLuhan predict the internet?
We’ve all heard of George Orwell predicting the age of omnipresent surveillance in 1984, decades before CCTV came into force, but there was an even more sagacious prediction made in the 20th century. This came from Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Father of Media Studies’, who predicted the internet almost 30 years before it was rolled out. Thinkers made many outlandish technological predictions during that century, but this one was remarkably accurate.
While many people can’t imagine life before the internet, particularly as the younger generation appears scarily fixated on their phones, laptops, and other gadgets—without a care for the real world—there was a time when it did not exist. It wasn’t even a figment in the collective imagination.
Heading back to 1962, when this was the case, but futuristic technological developments were starting to appear, and a cultural boom was on the horizon, McLuhan published his book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. It’s one of his most significant works, and in it, he analyses the impact of mass media, such as the printing press, on human consciousness.
In the book, McLuhan popularised the term ‘global village’ by stating that mass communication would give way to a village-like mindset that encompasses the entire world. He also, highly perceptively, said that technologies are a means of people reinventing themselves – you only have to look at the effect of social media to know this to be true. The character that people present themselves as on social media is often an affected rendering of their authentic self, modified in line with expectations or the person they want themselves to be deep down.
Elsewhere in The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan posited that human history could be divided into four different chapters: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the new electronic age. Considering we’re now in the digital age following the roll-out of electronic technologies, he wasn’t far off the mark. McLuhan suggested that in the electronic age, technology would distribute knowledge to everyone. It’s truly remarkable given the era in which it was written, particularly from our perspective, a time when debates about AI infiltrating society and modes of production abound. If only he could have lived to see this materialise.
“The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment,” McLuhan wrote in the book. “A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”
He didn’t just predict the internet either but foresaw what would become its undeniable and alarming flaws, as well as how it could be used for nefarious means. “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left,” he wrote, warning about giving up our naturally critical minds for the ease offered by the internet.
This theme of losing agency and the ability to self-critique online information is prominent in music today, with the likes of DIIV exploring it in their music. Furthermore, with concerns about fake news, mass personal information gathering online, and the rise of technocrats such as Elon Musk, this ominous part of McLuhan’s theory has also become, in part, true.
In his 1962 effort, Understanding Media, McLuhan also states: “Moving from print to electronic media, we have given up an eye for an ear.”
