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Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet. By ian f. mcneely with lisa wolverton. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. 352 pp. $25.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper).
Not everyone is awed by the Internet and its promise of millions of books, trillions of tweets, and an abundance of eBay sales. Certainly not the authors of Reinventing Knowledge. For them the Internet may (or may not) be the last in a line of institutions engaged in the "production, preservation, and transmission" of knowledge. What constituted knowledge, according to the authors, changed six times over the course of human history, and the institutions that accomplished these transformations were the library, the monastery, the university, the "republic of letters," the disciplines, and the laboratory. Each institution epitomized its era's conceptualization of knowledge and built...