Previous essays: 3: My Man in Belorussia 2: A New Renaissance 1: In the Beginning

Good for me, you might spit, but there is a point to mentioning this. This cafe is in the Piazza San Lorenzo, placing me outside the Laurentian Library. On the other side of that locked door sit some of the most important books in Western civilisation. Not just the most important titles, but the most important individual copies themselves.

There are the very copies of Plato's Dialogues that were rescued, and translated feet from where I type, which kicked off the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the modern age; fifteen-hundred-year-old copies of Virgil; handwritten manuscripts by Petrarch in which he invented the sonnet; shelves of priceless works on philosophy that had such influence on modern thinking that their ideas now seem more like common sense than things once debated and argued over.

But argued over they were. The story of the Renaissance up to the age that has given us the internet and space travel and all the wonders of modernity is a story of argument, debate and huge intellectual discord. With libraries and manuscripts, and the publishing of books, came the spreading of ideas. The more books people read, the more ideas they would receive. They more ideas they had, the more they would argue. The more they argued, and pushed, and stretched their world to fit, the more progress we made: the world that allows me to write this in Italy and send it instantly over the internet to Portland is directly traceable to the world started in the Laurentian Library and its counterparts around the world. Books mattered.

This isn't changing. For our generation, just explaining what we do for a living is something of a struggle. Things move fast. We're all working within concepts layered upon ideas, placed upon paradigms, based upon technologies that weren't even dreamt of a decade or two ago. It's not getting any simpler.

As the internet, and its effect on our lives, becomes ever more complex, so does the information we need to understand it. And the paradox of the age is that although we've built the greatest system for the sharing of information in the history of mankind, to really understand it we need to resort to the oldest technology. The future is silicon, but its heart is made of paper. In this new renaissance, books matter more than ever.

Over the next months, I'll be using this column to explore the way we understand the technology we're building — how we use the knowledge found in the books talked about elsewhere in this newsletter. I'll be looking at the key ideas behind the technology we work with every day and talking to the people who are working to understand them. I hope you'll join me.

Geek extraordinaire, open source icon, and Guardian correspondent Ben Hammersley will entertain Technica readers each month with various musings from the world of science and technology. Click here to visit his website.