What Wells envisaged for the entire world can easily be applied within an
organization in the form of an intranet. What is new and is termed knowledge
management is that we are now able to simulate rich, interactive, face-to-face
knowledge encounters virtually through the use of new communication technologies.
Information technologies such as an intranet and the Internet enable
us to knit together the intellectual assets of an organization and organize and
manage this content through the lenses of common interest, common language,
and conscious cooperation. We are able to extend the depth and breadth or
reach of knowledge capture, sharing, and dissemination activities, as we had
not been able to do before, and we find ourselves one step closer to Wells’
(1939) “perpetual digest . . . and a system of publication and distribution”
(pp. 70–71) “to an intellectual unification . . . of human memory” (pp. 86–87).