Dead technology commentators: Socrates and the Internet

The Greek Philosopher Socrates once told a story about the Egyptian God Theuth and the king Ammon. Theuth had invented the technology of writing and explained to the king how his new invention would make Egyptians wiser and improve their memories. Ammon didn't agree. This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. Socrates could just as easily have been talking about the Internet, which was invented more than 2000 years after his death. His “tiresome company” sounds suspiciously like that annoying friend who pulls out his smartphone to settle any argument. What To Remember Science recently published a paper by Betsy Sparrow and colleagues, which examined the results of four studies showing that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and instead recall where to access it. In Socrates words “they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” This is not necessarily a problem in itself but a sensible adaptation to the continuous access to information which the Internet gives us. Sparrow concludes that we using in the same way that we would previously have called on the knowledge of our social network. “Just as we learn through transactive memory who knows what in our families and offices, we are learning what the computer 'knows' and when we should attend to where we have stored information in our computer-based memories.” What Is Knowledge Anyway? Maybe the bigger question posed by Socrates's commentary is what is true knowledge? When you can get instant access to most of the world's information, or learn almost anything on Coursera, what does it really mean to know something? Socrates was somewhat biased in this regard since he was the originator of the "Socratic dialogue", where knowledge was acquired by asking questions, to find out more about the other person's understanding of a moral issue and the contradictions in his understanding. Socrates argued that you can't interrogate a book, or a website for that matter, but maybe the comments section of any blog or the direct dialogue enabled by Twitter can go part of the way there. “An intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent,” he explained.

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