Of Mediums and Messages

We look at the legacy of cultural icon Marshall McLuhan 50 years after his prophetic insights into the future of media.

This past year, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the world how our lives online are now available to any agency with the technology and the temptation to tap into them. This revelation has come decades after one thinker theorised about the way that technology would penetrate our daily existence in ways that few could have predicted. You may have never heard of Marshall McLuhan, but you have probably heard his most widely quoted dictum: "The medium is the message." McLuhan was writing about the effects of the mass media on contemporary life and he was talking mostly about television. But his ideas had something of the prophetic – because in the tumult of today’s digital revolution, a lot of what McLuhan said has even more relevance now than it did then.