Gutenberg Squared

When the relatively new information technology of books hit ancient Greece, Plato was concerned. If reading and writing catch on, he warned, they will have a detrimental effect. Human beings will lose their capacity for memory. Instead of internalizing the information they need, people will just write it down, to consult as needed. Education will degenerate. Instead of learning The Iliad and The Odessy by heart children will just put it on the shelf. The intellect will shrink as knowledge becomes stored outside the human mind.

Plato was the first media critic. Although it might seem easy to assume that Plato was overacting --- the fact remains that Plato was right. People in literate societies do seem to lack memory capacity of those in oral cultures. African tribesmen can still exhibit prodigious feats or memory, reciting seemingly endless genealogies and thousands of lines of tribal epics, while those of us who can read and write rely on Post-its to remind us what to pickup at the grocery store. New information media do affect the way people think, the possibilities of a culture, and its worldview.

Plato was correct to see that the worldview of his beloved Greece, with its tribal virtues, would be undermined by the rise of books. But this new information technology would fit well with the worldview of the ancient Hebrews, who believed that God communicates to human beings primarily through a Book. The Hebrew Bible goes back to the origins or writing itself.  The alphabet, which breaks down sounds of speech into discrete visible symbols makes reading and writing possible and easily learned, was the invention of an ancient Middle Eastern people, the Phoenicians, whose Semitic language is related to Hebrew.