You will find in Plato's Phaedrus a story about Thamus, king of a great city in Upper Egypt. For people like us, who are prone (in Thoreau's phrase) to be the tools of our tools, few legends are more instructive than his. The story, as Socrates tells it to his friend Phaedrus, goes like this: Thamus once entertained 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 Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Theuth outlined his inventions to King Thamus, arguing that they should be widely known and accessible to the Egyptians. Socrates continues: Thamus inquired into the use of each of them, and as Theuth went through them he expressed his approval or disapproval, according as he judged Theuth's assertions to be well or ill-founded. It would take too long to go through everything Thamus reports. having said for and against each of Theuth's inventions. But as he wrote, Theuth declared: “Here is an accomplishment, my lord the king, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I discovered a sure source of memory and wisdom. To this, Thamus replied: “Theuth, my model of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or evil which will accrue to those who practice it. you, who are the father of writing, you attribute to it, out of affection for your descendants, the complete opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to remember things through external signs rather than through their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for remembrance, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your students will have the reputation of it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and therefore will be considered very learned when most of them are quite ignorant. : This is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay And because they are filled with the vanity of wisdom instead of true wisdom, they will be a burden on society. legend, because Thamus' answer contains several solid principles from which we can begin to learn to think wisely about a technological society. In fact, there is even an error in Thamus's judgment, from which we can also learn something important. The error does not lie in his assertion that writing damages memory and creates false wisdom. It is demonstrable that writing had such an effect. Thamus's mistake is to believe that writing will be a burden on society and nothing but a burden. For all his wisdom, he fails to imagine what the benefits of writing might be, which, as we know, were considerable. We can learn from this that it is a mistake to assume that all 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.