Who was Marshall McLuhan? The man who predicted the internet had a stark warning for how it might be used

The philosopher foresaw the tremendous, transformative nature of the web. But he had a chilling warning about how it might be abused

Marshall McLuhan is being celebrated by a Google doodle, which claims him as the man who predicted the internet and the impact it would have. But he was also the man who foresaw the many dangers that it now poses to us.

As he predicted the internet, he pointed to the tremendous, transformative effects that it could have – and that it would go on to have, throughout culture. He described it as a "cool" technology, meaning that unlike the hot technology of print it would encourage interactivity and participation, allowing anyone to contribute.

That would have the effect of creating a "global village" – one of many catchy, influential phrases that he coined – one which could transform the way that people understand and interact with each other in the most profound ways.

And Professor McLuhan didn't only seem to predict the internet in broad, philosophical terms. At times he seems to describe the exact mechanisms of how it works now.

"The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment," he wrote in 1962. "A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind."

What Professor McLuhan is talking about sounds a lot like the internet, but his predictions actually came decades before the web arrived. The internet itself has proven Professor McLuhan more right than he might ever have imagined, allowing him to emerge from the occasional mockery to which he has been subjected.

But just as he is praised for his predictions of the transformative power of the internet, he should be heeded in his terrifying warnings about what it could be used for. Professor McLuhan is remembered for the phrase "the medium is the message", signifying his belief that it was the way someone receives information that mattered as much as or more than the actual information itself. That in turn demonstrated both the power of and the problems with the way the media can shape our understanding.

"Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left," he wrote. It seems a prescient warning about the ways that the most powerful things about the internet – its ability to bring people together in communities and alter the ways we see the world – would be harnessed by private companies, who would be able to change our world just as profoundly.

Today much of Professor McLuhan's global village takes part in private spaces: the main town square is Facebook, which is run for commercial profit, limiting the things that can be discussed and hoovering up data on what people talk about to sell it to advertisers. That company has taken some of the warnings Professor McLuhan made to a literal and disturbing extent, buying up companies like Oculus so that it can literally put content right in front of people's eyes, ears and nerves.

Even Google, which celebrates the visionary's 106th birthday in today's doodle, controls much of both the medium and the message in the modern world. Its search algorithm helps people find information but decides what information they see and how – and it too has looked to reach right down into people's nerves, with divisions that are looking to shape the future of healthcare and virtual reality.

The Google doodle depicts the progress of humanity through the four ages that Professor McLuhan saw. That began with us sitting around a fire in the Acoustic Age, and we progressed through the Written Age, the age of Mass Production, and into the Global Village or Electronic Age that we live in now.