The Awesome Prescience of McCluhan

It always astonishes me, although I’m long since the time that I should be astonished, at the prescience and genius of McLuhan. How was he able to peer into the future as he did? He himself observed that:

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

It seems that McLuhan was able to turn a rear-view mirror into a looking glass. I believe that McLuhan consciously and consistently exercised the effort that this blog aspires to: Tracing a path to the future by projecting himself forward and studying the present anthropologically.

It was the following quote that struck me arrears earlier today:

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself.’

As one considers the concept of user-generated media, wikinomics, and, indeed, the sum of Web 2.0, it seems that even considering a time of Post-McLuhanism is premature indeed.

With that said, McLuhan himself once observed that:

“I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”

Link to more McLuhan quotes