THE 20th-century futurists were susceptible to making some incredible predictions.
Marshall McLuhan did not exactly foresee it either, but he came closer than anyone to understanding our current technology-driven world. In 1962, the author, professor and media theorist made the prediction that we would have the internet.
In 1962, McLuhan published a novel called The Gutenberg Galaxy. In this novel, he suggested that human history could be divided into four different chapters: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the new electronic age. McLuhan assumed that this new frontier would be the home of what he called the “global village” — a space where technology would distribute knowledge to everyone and everything.
“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 1962. “A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” (“Marshall McLuhan: The Man Who Predicted the Internet and Warned Us of its Dangers,” History News Network, 7 December 2020)
Almost 60 years ago now, the Canadian thinker gave us a glimpse of what we now know as the Internet. Among the features of this “global village” that he foresaw was, as he put it, the capability to “retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” Sound familiar? Try Facebook.
In McLuhan’s world though, the notion of media accountability was something that was taken for granted almost universally. Media organizations, influential as they were, could not openly say anything that misrepresented the truth, or else they would be held responsible for their actions and suffer the consequences. Indeed, it was quite common for media outlets to be discredited, and for journalists’ careers to be ended, when such misrepresentations — rare as they were in those days — did occur.
These days, no such thing happens to the likes of media platforms like Facebook, who could claim that all the content in their platforms belong not to them, but to their users. Even McLuhan, in all his sage thinking, could not have foreseen this complication.
How to solve a problem like Facebook, though? Not easily, I might add.
The “data of a saleable kind” that McLuhan was talking about is magnified many times over, in a platform like Facebook. Think about the rise of dictators’ scions like the son of Moammar Ghaddafi of Libya and our own Bongbong Marcos who, through the magical, fact-twisting magic of social media — have been able to launder the dirty baggage of their dictator fathers, and magically transformed themselves into “saviours” of the countries their “padre de familia” have singlehandedly managed to run to the ground. What sad irony, one might add. But an irony nevertheless made entirely possible by social media.
When the printing press was invented in the industrial revolution, it gave rise to the democratization of information on a mass and unprecedented scale. That too gave rise to its whole host of problems, most significant of which was the concentration of power to those who had control of the media. “Information is power,” they used to say, and that’s why the media outlets of the world and their owners became the power brokers of their day.
Today, we have a very different beast to tame, but a beast nevertheless. We are still in the wild, wild West days of social media, where people shoot before they talk, and where little law and order is present, if at all.
How we deal with this dilemma will, along with existential issues like climate change, human rights, and economic progress — determine and shape our future as a human species.