 Has the Internet changed society? About 50 years ago, the philosopher of communication, Marshall McLuhan, declared, the medium is the message. What McLuhan meant was that changes in media, such as the introduction of the Internet, television, radio, or printing, were more consequential for society than the messages uttered through them. But was McLuhan right? In a recent paper, MIT's Collective Learning Group tested McLuhan's hypothesis using thousands of biographies. They identified the city, place of birth, and occupation of the biographies with a presence in more than 15 different languages in Wikipedia. The data showed interesting signatures of McLuhan's hypothesis. First, the number of famous biographies doubled around the year 1450 when printing was invented. Also, the occupations of biographies change with the introduction of communication technologies. Before printing, most famous biographies involved political and religious leaders. After printing, they include artists, composers, astronomers, and mathematicians. Similar changes appeared with the introduction of film, radio, and television. The era of film and radio came together with the rise of famous performers, singers, and actors. The era of television with the rise of famous athletes such as soccer players and race car drivers. But does this mean that the introduction of media caused this change? Or is this just a correlation? Many factors can affect a city's ability to produce a famous scientist or artist. Population, history, and language are just a few of them. But the distance between a city and the German city of Mainz, the birthplace of printing, can only influence the birth of famous scientists or artists through the adoption of printing. The researchers show that cities that were closer to Mainz adopted printing earlier, and also produced their first famous artist or scientist sooner. They also found that a city's distance to Mainz predicted the birthplace of famous scientists and artists only after printing was introduced. Of course, this doesn't mean that other factors, such as language, science, or culture, don't play a role. It only means that printing is a factor for which we have robust evidence. Maybe McLuhan was right. The data tells us that the medium does change the message, and also that we may think of historical eras based on their dominant communication technology, the era of writing, the era of printing, the era of film and radio, the era of television, and the era of the internet. For more information, look for Hara Figueroa and all in plus one or visit pantheon.world.