You will find in Plato's Phaedrus a story about Tamos, the king of a great city in Upper Egypt. For people like us, who are inclined (as Thoreau put it) to be tools of our tools, few legends are more instructive than his. The story, as Socrates tells it to his friend Phaedrus, unfolds as follows: Tamos once hosted the god Theuth, who was the inventor of many things, including numbers, calculus, geometry, astronomy, and writing. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Theuth showed his inventions to King Thamus, arguing that they should be widely known and available to the Egyptians. Socrates continues: Thamus inquired about the use of each of them, and as Theuth examined them he expressed approval or disapproval, depending on whether he judged Theuth's statements to be well-founded or unfounded. It would take too long to go through everything Thamus reports. that he said for and against each of Theuth's inventions. But when it came to writing, Theuth declared: “Here is an achievement, my lord the king, which will improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure recipe for memory and wisdom." To this, Thamus replied: “Theuth, my example of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm that will accrue to those who practice it. you, who are the father of writing, out of affection for your descendants, have attributed to it anything but its true function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and will become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things back to their memory through external signs rather than through their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for remembrance, not memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation of it without it being reality: they will receive a quantity of information without adequate education, and consequently they will be considered very educated while they are for the most part completely ignorant. : This is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay And because they are filled with presumptions of wisdom instead of real wisdom, they will be a burden to society. "1 I begin my book with this legend because in Thamus's answer there are several sound principles from which we can begin to learn to think with wise circumspection about a technological society. In fact, there is also an error in Thamus's judgment, from which we can learn something important. The mistake is not in claiming that writing will damage memory and create false wisdom. It is demonstrable that writing has had such an effect. Thamus's mistake is in believing that writing will be a burden on the society and nothing more than a burden. For all his wisdom, he fails to imagine what the benefits of writing might be, which, as we know, have been considerable. From this we can learn that it is a mistake to assume that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not one or the other, but this and that.