In Glut, Alex Wright has crafted a worthy history lesson on classification systems. If that sounds dull, then consider it was humanity's passion for making lists and scribbling receipts that led to books, libraries, the democratisation of knowledge and - ta dah! – the Internet.

Every tribal community ever studied has divided plants or animals into nested categories, evidence of a human predilection for taxonomy. Myth and legend are also communicated down the generations, Wright says, which led to a theory of gene-culture co-evolution, or 'epigenetic' rules, where conclusions appear to be predisposed.

Whether information is gathered into networks or hierarchies, however, is a sticking point. The two can co-exist and give rise to one another, but they can also stand in stark contrast.

One example is Linnaeus' hierarchical Systema Naturae of 1735, which became the modern biological classification system. A contemporary of his, Frenchman Comte de Buffon – "the great advocate of individualism in opposition to classification" – was gunning for a more malleable system that somehow took into account nature's ever-changing ways. It's tantalising fragments such as this that keep this book interesting, as well as a long roll of unsung heroes worthy of recognition: the businessmen of Uruk, whose scrawled receipts constituted the
first handwriting; the Irish scribes who preserved texts through the chaos of the Dark Ages; the futuristic precursors of the World Wide Web, including Paul Otlet's 1934 vision of an electronic telescope that linked remote users to huge databases.

Glut is a book about what we take for granted, and it turns out that what we take for granted is what keeps us together: we are human, hence we are organised.