Marshall McLuhan's 106th birthday: Google dedicates doodle to Herbert who predicted World Wide Web

To mark Marshall McLuhan 106th birthday of Canadian professor and philosopher who specialised in media theory and is best known for coining the term "global village" .

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in July 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada was also the person who  predicted the world wide web 30 years before it was invented. It was in 1960s that he started becoming famous as television was starting to become part of everyday life.

He wrote: “The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form.

“A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”

McLuhan believed that society was shaped by the technology it used and crucially the way it shared information. One of his most famous phrases is the term "the medium is the message".

"Today’s Doodle, which celebrates the visionary’s 106th birthday, illustrates this theory by showing how McLuhan viewed human history. He saw it through the lens of 4 distinct eras: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the electronic age," explained Google.

"He believed that the way in which someone receives information is more influential than the information itself. Throughout the '60s and '70s, McLuhan made frequent TV appearances to share his theories with both followers and skeptics."

"Decades later, we honor the man whose prophetic vision of the “computer as a research and communication instrument” has undeniably become a reality," Google said.