Papyrus

Highlights

discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners, because they will not use their memories; they will put their trust in books and not remember for themselves. It will not be wisdom but only a semblance of wisdom that writing will give to men; they will hear many things and not truly learn them;

Socrates feared that, with writing, men would abandon the effort of thought itself. Knowledge, he suspected, would be entrusted to texts, and it would be enough to have them within reach without bothering to truly understand them.

This raises unsettling questions: Beneath this deluge of information, where is the wisdom? Is our lazy memory becoming simply an address book for locating information, with no trace of the information itself? Are we fundamentally more ignorant than our ancient ancestors with their prodigious memories?

“Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.”