In my opinion Socrates is totally wrong. In Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about a famous old god named Theuth. He was the inventor of many arts but his greatest was the use of letters which he shared with another god named Thamus. Now the two gods did not agree with each other as their points of view were different. Thamus thought that writing would not help one learn a certain subject or even increase their memory. But Theuth thought the complete opposite, he believes that writing will make learning easier as well as improve ones memory. I can relate to Thamus’ idea as without writing down anything I would not be able to remember any of the information given to me. Without writing down how would we learn about the past, we wouldn’t know much information/history at all. Without writing none of these stories would exist today, and I doubt we would even be in this class or even have to read this.
In the article “The Oral World vs. The Written Word” written by Nicholas Carr, we see that Plato kind of contradicts himself. Plato had written Phaedrus but he also believes that writing isn’t always the right way to go and can sometimes hold you back from learning. Imagine the world without writing, all the events that have happened in the past would not be brought down to us. The world would not be the same as it is today, nothing that people have learned would be open to us today and the world would be in different. In this article we see that Carr clearly points out the issues that oral education has and as I said in the paragraph above that we would not be reading about the ideas of Plato or Socrates without writing.
The internet is in fact making individuals extremely lazy and contributing to a weaker memory. The reason as to why I believe this is because if we don’t remember something that we’ve learned in the past we can always refer to Google. In the olden days if you didn’t remember something you learned/read about you would have to get the book that you read it from and read it once again. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, we see that Carr clearly clearly shows us as to how we process information and how it has changed because of the internet. Instead of reading to find out an answer we tend to just refer to Google. This is the reason as to why I agree with Carr because the internet is making us lazy but people don’t realize it cause everyone’s doing it. There is no effort being put into a project, no one needs to use their brain anymore because Google is there. Since there is so much information on the web why would one rent out a book? Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed that I’m unable to comprehend to many things I read especially books. I can comprehend much better if an article or passage is online rather that in a book. Even though the passage is online I still have a hard time understanding what is being said and often have to re-read it. This shows that the web is dulling our minds in a certain aspects but then again without the web or internet many technologies today would not be available to us.
– Mohammed H. Jacksi