In the first article “Phaedrus”, Socrates talks about how writing is bad because he states that when the author writes something, he has a specific idea or concept in mind when he is writing. When the author dies, his writings are left to be read by others but unfortunately, that is where the problem with writing arises. Since the writer is gone, no one can accurately know what his original idea was and therefore the writing can be mistaken by and abused by those who don’t understand what the article is talking about.
While I agree with Socrates that writing can cause problems because of the way readers can misinterpret what writers have written, I don’t believe that simply passing knowledge through oral means is a perfect solution to this problem. Writing is a very efficient way to record the history and events of the past and a way for people to bring their ideas to others in an easy to understand way even if they may not understand it. Passing of information purely through oral communication can cause problems because no person’s memory is perfect and as a result, information can be lost or broken apart over time. The best way of passing information should be the usage of both oral and written information.
With Nicholas Carr, his idea that the internet is affecting our intelligence is acceptable according to how he points it out. As a result of people having to scan websites for information rather than doing research in a library like in the past, people have become accustomed to not reading entire books or articles but rather skim through it looking for essential keywords for what their looking for. Its very noticeable when many people around you are constantly looking at their phones and computers intently but rarely seem to be able to hold attention when reading any sort of book or newspaper. In order to fix this problem, it is important that people should use their free time instead of going on the internet to read a book in order to regain the ability to read long texts and articles.