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At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the printing press changed the world. With the Internet, we are on the verge of another such change as we head into the twenty-first.

Five hundred years ago, the automated reproduction of text improved the speed and accuracy with which religious thought, political and social ideas, literature, and news propagated through the civilized world. Not only did the printing press represent greater efficiencies, but it made entirely new forms of literature and thought possible—the novel, for example, was all but impossible before this advance. The spread of Protestantism required the printing press; how else could every household own a copy of the Bible in its own language?

Today we brace for a similar revolution, this time facilitated not by platens, paper, and type but by a network of wires that stretches around the world, through which computers relay information to one another. The Internet represents a quantum leap in speed and efficiency over its older sibling, the printing press, and we must suppose it will change not only the way media are distributed but the shape of human thought itself.

I believe the strongest clues to the way this will actually take place lie in the foundation of the Internet: its protocol. Like civil laws that guide us in our social and political life, and like moral principles that inform our daily decisions, the information-sharing protocols of the Internet will gird our civilization with order.

Critics love to use the phrase, the test of time. If a work of literature, for instance, withstands this test, it must have some merit. What is the basis for this merit? There are really two intrinsic bases: the truth of that which is said, and the skill with which it is said. As Quintillian said, rhetoric requires "a good man speaking well."

These bases are inside the writing itself, but there are also factors outside the text: the binding, the cover, the numbered pages, the index, and the dry shelf on which the book is kept. These factors have to work in favor of the book if its information is to stick around.

How does this relate to the Internet? The hallmark of durable information is not simply good content but also good form. Durability is as much a question of structure as of content. Good structure, both internal and external to the information, creates and preserves the meaning of its content. And the Internet is nothing if not the soul of structure, communicating as it does through strict, simple protocols (http, smtp, ftp) and through predictable browsing formats.

Physical libraries have traditionally represented the strongest bastion against the loss of information. The Library of Congress catalogs and preserves everything from ancient philosophy to American folk music. The New York Public Library houses thousands of original modern manuscripts. Interest-organizations preserve texts which are related to their interests; my Reformed Protestant alma mater keeps several early editions of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and a first edition of his Seasonable Counsel in the "Bunyan Room" above the library.

When the Library at Alexandria was trashed by a mob of barbarians in a.d. 400, the greatest storehouse of ancient information moved from reality into myth. All but seven of Sophocles' 123 plays were burned in the stoves of Egyptian bathhouses. The civilized world regrets losing those writings, not for sentimental reasons, but because they would have advanced our understanding of how humans communicate with one another, as well as increased our ability to communicate with one another. Instead, the Western world was plunged into the Dark Ages for a thousand years.

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