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The Five Knowledge Storage Media
had to tell many people, in a memorable and consistent manner. The estab-
lishment of the mythology of the human race represents this attempt at
knowledge longevity.* The problem with knowledge-in-books is that it is
utterly passive. A book on how to play tennis does not play tennis. To
incarnate this knowledge, it must be transferred into one of the other
media. Because we do not have the capability of developing tennis-playing
DNA (yet), this means the knowledge must be transferred either to brains
(teach someone how to play tennis) or hardware (create a tennis playing
machine). The advantage of books is that the resident knowledge is at least
somewhat persistent. Books, therefore, are persistent but passive knowl- ...