Google’s Doodle have a fondness for celebrating legendary figures, but today’s person of interest feels more appropriate for the venue than most. The company hails Canadian professor, philosopher, and media sage Marshall McLuhan as a man who “saw the internet coming — and predicted just how much impact it would have.”

McLuhan’s philosophies were built on four pillars that theorized society is shaped by technology and the way in which information is shared. He broke history down into different eras tracing the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the electronic age.

Today’s Doodle honors his 106th birthday by animating McLuhan’s division of history into colorful little GIFs.

Along with his many books, McLuhan gave the world a number of wonderful quotes, many of them listed on his Wikipedia page. Perhaps McLuhan’s most famous quote pertains to his belief that the way in which someone receives information is more important than what that information actually is: “The medium is the message.”