None of these questions is new. They have been asked before in different contexts by others. If the web of knowledge were completely wired then I could tag on the appropriate historical citations at this point, and pull out the historical context for all these musings.
Researchers dream of such a heavily connected network of data and ideas.
The first step toward a highly linked web of knowledge was made by U.S. Army medical librarians trying to unify the indexing of medical journals. In 1955, Eugene Garfield, a librarian on that project who was interested in machine indexing, developed a computer system to automatically track the bibliographic citations of every scientific paper published in medicine. This citation index allows me to track the future dissemination of my own ideas. Again, assume Out of Control was indexed as a paper. Every year I could consult the ISI Citation Index and get a list of all those authors who cited my work in their work.