Further Background
We are moderns, and as moderns we have unprecedented access to technology. Advancements in semi-conductors, LCD, LED, and AMOLED screen technology, batteries, and so on, have made mobile computing and desktop computing technologies both cheaper and more powerful. But this Promethium-like power carries with it new responsibilities and new problems, and these responsibilities and problems are unique to our time, right?
In Plato's Phaedrus, written around 370 BC, Socrates warns his dialogic partner, Phaedrus, of the dangers of writing. Theuth, an Egyptian God, goes to the king, Thamus, to present to the king his “arts,” which included the latest high-tech innovation—writing. The king was not altogether too pleased. “The fact is,” Thamus says of writing, “this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it because they will not need to exercise their memories…” (Re)presentation is inferior to presentation, the direct or “pure” presentation or struggle for truth, which for Plato and Socrates, the inventors of the Platonic dialogue, invariably meant the dyadic dialogue. Among other charges, Socrates claims writing is a poison for memory. Is any of this sounding familiar?
History does indeed repeat itself, everything eternally (re)occuring just as Nietsche believed.
Recently, the Platonic obsession with writing technologies—the Platonic Question, as I’ll call it—has had quite the resurgence. Writers and philosophers from Jacques Derrida, Walter Ong, Deberah Brandt, Daniel Keller, Leonard Shlain, and Nicholas Carr, to name only a handful, have all taken up the Platonic Question in one form or another. While all come to different conclusions, all seem to agree on one basic point: technology affects our ways of being and thinking in the world; writing is a technology, therefore it affects us in these ways. But reading many of these critiques on the Platonic Problem, it’s as if these critics aren’t reading each other: Ong, Shlain, and Brandt focus on the effect of writing, while Keller and Carr focus primarily (though by no means solely) on reading, and Derrida—well, Derrida is Derrida.
The purpose of this study is not to put all these sources in conversation, but to engage some of them in new ways. To this end, I'm going to be using Keller, Ong, and Brandt as the analytical basis of my study, and I'm going to do things with their ideas that they had perhaps not intended.
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In Plato's Phaedrus, written around 370 BC, Socrates warns his dialogic partner, Phaedrus, of the dangers of writing. Theuth, an Egyptian God, goes to the king, Thamus, to present to the king his “arts,” which included the latest high-tech innovation—writing. The king was not altogether too pleased. “The fact is,” Thamus says of writing, “this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it because they will not need to exercise their memories…” (Re)presentation is inferior to presentation, the direct or “pure” presentation or struggle for truth, which for Plato and Socrates, the inventors of the Platonic dialogue, invariably meant the dyadic dialogue. Among other charges, Socrates claims writing is a poison for memory. Is any of this sounding familiar?
History does indeed repeat itself, everything eternally (re)occuring just as Nietsche believed.
Recently, the Platonic obsession with writing technologies—the Platonic Question, as I’ll call it—has had quite the resurgence. Writers and philosophers from Jacques Derrida, Walter Ong, Deberah Brandt, Daniel Keller, Leonard Shlain, and Nicholas Carr, to name only a handful, have all taken up the Platonic Question in one form or another. While all come to different conclusions, all seem to agree on one basic point: technology affects our ways of being and thinking in the world; writing is a technology, therefore it affects us in these ways. But reading many of these critiques on the Platonic Problem, it’s as if these critics aren’t reading each other: Ong, Shlain, and Brandt focus on the effect of writing, while Keller and Carr focus primarily (though by no means solely) on reading, and Derrida—well, Derrida is Derrida.
The purpose of this study is not to put all these sources in conversation, but to engage some of them in new ways. To this end, I'm going to be using Keller, Ong, and Brandt as the analytical basis of my study, and I'm going to do things with their ideas that they had perhaps not intended.
Back