Literacy in the digital age

TOWARDS JUSTICE

- EMMELINE AGLIPAY-VILLAR

“The most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children, have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth [...]”

It’s a funny thing that Socrates, one of the world’s foremost thinkers about whom so much has been written, was not a fan of the written word. Certainly, a part of this has to be influenced by the fact that writing itself was “new” in Socrates’ time, at least in comparison to the oral tradition of teaching and passing on skills and information, with which Socrates was adept. But Socrates also provided compelling reasons for his view: for him, the written word was inferior as a teaching tool to speech because it was not immediate or interactive—the written word cannot respond to questions like a philosopher can reply to an interlocutor. A written text cannot answer the question: “What do you mean?”