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The Five Knowledge Storage Media
Intentionality. Books share with hardware the characteristic that it is not
easy to “accidentally” create them. Therefore, books have high intentionality.
Self-Modification. Knowledge retained in book form has absolutely no
capability of updating itself. Indexing tools that automatically operate on
written words (such as LaTeX) are, of course, software.
Modify Surroundings. Knowledge in books has no way of modifying the
world outside the book. True, the ideas in a book may be revolutionary, but
the knowledge in the book must first be transported into one of the other
media before it can take action. Knowledge in books is utterly passive.
Software
Persistency. Software, justifiably, has been accused of having a very
short ...