Our current age of information has rightly been called a second renaissance. But what ignites a renaissance? It has to do with bringing together ideas and cultures in fresh ways and with unprecedented intensity. That's the reason Gutenberg was so important to the first renaissance: the printing press, the new technologies that enabled its invention, and a burgeoning shipping trade were the Internet of their day. Ideas began to move en masse and with a momentum that was unimaginable before. Thanks to the facility of Western European character sets, printing with movable type took off in Europe, helping spark an economic boom that left much of the rest of the world struggling to catch up.

The digital-media revolution enabled our current renaissance. From Ethernet to Internet to World Wide Web to Google, from silicon biology to nanoscience, worlds of ideas have collided. Just as a 16th-century Renaissance man felt empowered by a bundle of books in his saddle­bag, a 21st-century renaissance woman with a laptop feels she has the entire store of human knowledge at her fingertips.