Baron 1

What stood out to me as interesting is the mention of Socrates mentioning to Phaedrus that writing and the invention of writing will actually make people's memory weaker. They believed that because having the experience firsthand of physically hearing a certain story, and experiencing that information first hand can be much more powerful than something that was written in the past and then delivered as information as one reads it. Socrates also says that writing can be a form of trickery. Because if you talk to someone face to face, you can make them tell the truth and therefore have the power of not receiving lies. This is in contrast to whereas in writing it is more difficult to ascertain its truthfulness because anyone can just writing whatever they want down and be fairly anonymous, in the sense that you have to psychically seek them out to see if their writing is lying or not.

This notion of writing is fake is in dire contrast to today's society where people's word of mouth is less believed to be the truth than something that is physically written down. In today's culture it is hard pressed to find someone who will agree to anything without your personal signature that states that you agree with something. If you only say that you will agree but not write it down, then it is considered illegitimate. Spoken words are much less trusted. This is why in today's society we have laws that are all in written form so that they are concrete. Just from this example one can see how important the technology of writing is to our society and culture today. Writing creates order and organization. This is because it is an unchangeable or arguably difficult to change type of format. This is why a personal signature is so important, because it gives concrete evidence of an agreement or situation, whereas in oral culture, you can say that you give them your word to promise something, but there is no concrete evident to support that.