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Yesterday Marshall McLuhan would have been 99 years old. He was the media mastermind behind phrases like “the medium is the message,” and terms like “global village,” “hot" (for their lack of participation) and “cool” (for work required by participants) media.

He saw the world changing with computers, televisions, and technologies condensing all the world’s books into a “desktop of microfilm," (as in this 1967 interview with the CBC) McLuhan had an impeccable sense of how life was changing in the electronic era.

He was academically trained in literature, and with this eye he saw society moving from the individualized culture influenced by the books as the primary media, to an age of the “tribe,” or “global village.” A society characterized by the immediacy of electronics, a society connected like never before. But this was not without a careful consideration of the depersonalization of electronics, as he described in a March 1969 Interview with Playboy:

Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

And as a sort of odd coincident, Facebook hit 500 million users on McLuhan’s birthday. To put that in perspective, 1 in every 14 people on the planet is now a member of the social networking giant—what would McLuhan have thought of this electric tribe? Is this on the verge of the computer-induced global telepathy he discussed (or is it just a whole lot of people gathered in one place)? Could he ever imagined the extent that electronics would prevail, or the extreme connectivity of the digital age?

In any case, Happy Belated Birthday Marshall.

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