• by Marco Greenberg , April 11, 2007

Mention the word "history" to a new-media crowd, and my bet is that you'll get a lot of blank stares.

Our collective historical memory begins somewhere in the early-mid 90s when Netscape launched its first browser, continues a few years later with memories of wincing at the miscues of the first Internet crash in the documentary Startup.com and ends with the founders of YouTube initially pondering how many videos people would actually want to post and watch.

If history is little more than nostalgic waxing at best, or at worse has about as much relevance as a pile of outdated and discarded cell phones, what's the use?

Let's go back to a man who never sent an e-mail or posted a Web video clip. Yet he was the first, and perhaps is still, one of the most preeminent experts in all of new media identifying the intersection of technology and communications.

Meet, or get reacquainted with, Marshall McLuhan, named the "Patron Saint" of Wired magazine, who coined many of the terms you know: "the medium is the message," "global village," "feed forward," "electronic media," and even "surfing" for data.

In our constant drive to get the next "upgrade," ditch a "legacy system," and "monetize" the Web for ourselves and our clients, what can Professor McLuhan, who died in 1980, possibly teach us?

Let's take his book written in 1968, War and Peace in the Global Village. Would it resonate today? It is not just a sober reminder of how violence escalates along with advances in technology (see Iraq). Just check out some of the things he said and how he said them: i.e. rich content in short bytes, accompanied by radical visual images, written almost wiki-like in leaving room for others to post comments on the side of the page.

While I cannot claim to comprehend all the ideas and nuances of this complex and heady genius (McLuhan was famous for complaining that students and "experts" never really understood him), here are some of McLuhan's own words (in quotes) and my attempts at interpretation.

• View technology as living: "The computer is by all odds the most extraordinary of all the technological clothing ever devised by man, since it is the extension of our central nervous system." (Biotechnology, hand-helds, implanted chips etc.)

• Create a new language: "The computer abolishes the human past by making it entirely present. It makes natural and necessary a dialogue among cultures which is as intimate as private speech, yet dispensing entirely with speech." (The Web, globalization, Webcams and txt.)

• Advertise with selectivity: "But advertising as an educational onslaught, a massive barrage against human sensibilities, is too familiar to need further comment here." (McLuhan was regaled by both ad shops and publications.)

• Be a social being: "Our whole social life is now becoming a service environment." (Service economy, social networking, etc.)

• Replicate yourself: "Unlike animals, man has no nature but his own history, his total history. Electronically, this total history is now potentially present in a kind of simultaneous transparency..." (Search engines, privacy, transparency, etc.)

• Expect what's next: "All media or technologies, languages as much as weaponry, create new environments or habitats, which become the milieux for new species or technologies." (What comes after the blog?)

• Think critically: "We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies." (Lack of human contact, compulsive checking of e-mail in box, IMs, text etc., etc.)

Take time out to read McLuhan, draw your own conclusions, and build on his theories to "feed forward."