Writing (Alphabet)

Two and a half thousand years before anyone worried about smartphones rotting kids' brains, Socrates had already reached the same conclusion about writing. The argument turns up in Phaedrus, a philosophical dialogue written by Plato around 370 BCE in which Socrates and a young friend talk through the ethics of persuasion. At one point Socrates tells a story: the Egyptian god Theuth presents his new invention, writing, to the king Thamus, who promptly tears a strip off him. Writing, Thamus says, will "implant forgetfulness" in people's souls, because they will "cease to exercise memory." Socrates then makes the case in his own voice. Written words, he complains, are like paintings. They "preserve a solemn silence" when you try to ask them questions, cannot defend themselves, and give students "the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom." It is often tidied up as an early panic about new media, but the objection is more specific than that. Socrates was defending live dialogue (the back-and-forth questioning he preferred) against a medium that, once fixed on the page, could not answer back. The joke, of course, is that we know any of this only because Plato wrote it down.

The worry Socrates named — that the unaided mind will atrophy — has been recycled in every new medium since. Writing did change how humans think. It also made civilisation possible.