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Howard hit on one major take­away that I had from our week in the UK. “Increas­ingly I think the dig­i­tal divide is less about access to tech­nol­ogy and more about the dif­fer­ence between those who know how and those who don’t know how,” he said. He’s con­vinced that what’s most impor­tant is not access to the Inter­net — we have more than a bil­lion peo­ple on the Inter­net now and there are 4 bil­lion phones out there — but access to knowl­edge and lit­era­cies for the dig­i­tal age. “The abil­ity to know has sud­denly become the abil­ity to search and the abil­ity to sift” and dis­cern. “Skill plus social” is the key.

At a certain point in the 17th century, the known world suddenly became, in one particular and peculiar sense, unknowable. This seems, on the face of it, counter-intuitive: This was, after all, a time when modern science came into existence, when mathematics and methodology reorganized the capacity and reach of thought, when thinkers such as Descartes, Galileo and Newton altered the conceptual fabric of the universe, and gave the woozy gauze of what had been imagined the hard contours of what could be measured. But at the same time, this period of immense, almost incredible, transformation meant the end of homo universalis; if man could now measure everything, he was no longer the measure of everything.

Who was the last universal genius, the last person to grasp the entirety of knowledge? The most famous candidate is Gottfried Leibniz, whose research and achievements are asthma-inducing in breadth--and extend to studying Chinese and writing poetry. Less well-known, but no less interesting, is the Jesuit priest Anasthasius Kircher, who, over 72 volumes, analyzed everything from Egyptian hieroglyphics to harmonics.

But by the turn of the 18th century, this kind of panoptic vision was increasingly impossible; there was simply too much to know; and the deaths of Kircher in 1680 and Leibniz in 1716 marked the beginning of a new era in conceptual history, one that might be seen as the flip side of the rise of specialization