The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman is the first book I've read that actively references information pulled from the Internet - including many direct quotes from Wikipedia.
I don't know how writer's managed to pull together anything comprehensive before the Internet existed. I've just begun reading The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker which was first published in 1973 - and in it, Becker decries the mountains of research and information that exist in the world and the lack of organization to it all.
Well in a sense with the net and specifically Wikipedia, we now do have an organizing force collecting and updating mankind's ever growing foundation of knowledge. I've been transcribing my interview with Frances Macnutt and I don't know what I would do without Google and Amazon and Wikipedia.
In just the first ten minutes of our chat, Macnutt referenced St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, President Obama's Inaugural Address, a study of the sexual abuse of women in America, John Newton and John T. Noonan's A Church That Can and Cannot Change. Yes I have a basic knowledge of some of these but jumping online and doing just a few minutes of research about each one adds layers of understanding and depth to the interview that would have taken months of research before the availability of the Web!
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It is pretty amazing what we have at our fingertips. I have been so accustom now to having Google on my phone that when we were in Boeing getting a tour and a question came up I reached into my back pocket to Google it and I couldn't (security reasons and all). Amazing at the information that we can get our hands on.
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