"Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media - under cold conditions, and constantly."
The Canadian academic and media guru Marshall McLuhan was writing in 1967, in The Medium is the Massage, a graphic book of his ideas.
He might have been commenting on the 'Arab Spring', or a recent report in Wired magazine on the US army's drive to recruit Twitter experts ('Army Seeks Social Media Gurus to Save Afghan War').
Like much of McLuhan's writing, it seems prophetic.
McLuhan, who died in 1980, has been enjoying renewed interest for apparently foreseeing the world of the internet.
"All the world's a sage," he quipped in the same book. Could anyone more neatly describe the effect of Google?
The professor's aphoristic certainties won him a cult following. They also meant, like the sayings of Nostradamus, that he can be infinitely interpreted into correctness.
This year is the centenary of McLuhan's birth, and there's a new site, Marshall McLuhan Speaks, with TV interview clips in which McLuhan pontificates on various subjects including television news and war reporting.
As media changes - from centralised to dispersed, from one-way to two-way - there's room for a new McLuhan to make intellectual sense of current trends and tell us whether we should welcome or fear them.
There have been candidates for the role over the years. Neil Postman had a stab at it in relation to the proliferation of media with his Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985).
But there's a bigger job to be done today, and there are plenty of candidates out there. Clay Shirky, a New York University professor, for instance, explores his interest in the effects of the internet on society in Here Comes Everyone (2008) and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010).
But for my money the most interesting thinkers are those who swim against the tide of the latest conventional wisdom, rather than trying to articulate it.
Recently, among the dissenters, I've enjoyed the indignant You Are Not a Gadget(2010) by the software engineer-turned-commentator Jaron Lanier, and I'm reading The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You (2011)by Eli Pariser.
Pariser is also prophetic, in the sense that he highlights a future problem. As online software responds to our interests more efficiently and with increasing ubiquity, he argues, we find ourselves living in a 'filter bubble' in which we are only presented with information - by the likes of Google and Facebook - that matches our previous interests and confirms our existing views.
You can see the problem - not just for journalists (working to Gawker and the Huffington Post's relentless promotion of the most popular stories) but for society as a whole. If people are never exposed to information that isn't about a current interest or doesn't confirm an existing opinion, their horizons will be dangerously limited.
McLuhan has been portrayed as the spokesperson for new styles of communication. His most famous phrases, "the medium is the message" and "the global village", seem to embrace the new world as well as describe it.
But one of the benefits of seeing McLuhan speak for himself online is that it becomes clear he did not want to be the cheerleader for media change.
In one of the clips on the McLuhan Speaks site, he explains his attitude.
"I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favour of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I'm resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button."
Who will emerge as today's McLuhan, able to articulate neatly our world of instant, continuous information flow?
Until a new language is found, the shifting boundaries between news, social media, internet information, mass communication and personalisation will remain a tangle of existing concepts and attitudes, sugared with attempts to 'get it'.
And McLuhan would have been fascinated by it all.
