A very old discussion about the nature of “technology” - almost 2380 years old and … still counting

A very old discussion about the nature of “technology” - almost 2380 years old and … still counting

by Deleted user -
Number of replies: 5
"A very old discussion about the nature of “technology” - almost 2380 years old and … still counting "
Athens around 370 BC, in a sunny day under a plane-tree, by the banks of the Ilissus river.

SOCRATES: “… in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions … but when they came to letters, this, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or in utility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for 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.”

Phaedrus, By Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Available online at: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html


I’m Fotis Begklis the new GLEU academic developer - learning technologist and I’ve chosen this short abstract to introduce my self not only of my Greek roots. My areas of expertise are multimedia; distance learning; video conferencing; digital storytelling and online collaborative learning.

In reply to Deleted user

Re: A very old discussion about the nature of “technology” - almost 2380 years old and … still counting

by Deleted user -
These days I keep encountering things which make me think about archiving, and encourage comparison between text and multimedia. Watching the video recordings of our local hustings the other day I realised how much I had misremembered, despite my jotted notes. I was grateful for the recordings - but if I'd known shorthand I'd have taken a selective transcript and that would have been sufficient for my purposes, namely recording certain pledges.

Big Brother editorial team member Lennaart Van Oldenberg wrote in the Deptford TV Diaries about the futility of trying to capture it all and the need for data reduction:

"in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story On Exactitude in Science: they produced a map of the Empire so precise that it was exactly the same size as the empire itself, but later generations quickly realised the uselessness of this map and gave it up to the elements."

The first time I came across the idea of 'archivitis' (which I think Derrida and Foucault diagnosed much earlier) was listening to this LSE 'Thinking Like a Social Scientist' recorded lecture by Michael Cox, in which he discussed the relationship between historians and social scientists and touched on similar ideas to the ones you give us above, Fotis.

At a public level, recording and archiving is a great social good. But anybody who has ever tried to use, say, the Hansard Reports, quickly realises that to record and archive is not the same as knowing and understanding - and as a personal practice it fails if you need a second lifetime to make sense of everything you have collected. At some stage there is always filtering - meaning making - to be done, and acquiring the critical literacy to make meaning out of masses of information is one of the main aims of learning today.

In reply to Deleted user

Re: A very old discussion about the nature of “technology” - almost 2380 years old and … still counting

by Deleted user -
I'd like to hear what Thamus has to say about facebook
In reply to Deleted user

Re: A very old discussion about the nature of “technology” - almost 2380 years old and … still counting

by Deleted user -
I think he's on it
In reply to Deleted user

Re: A very old discussion about the nature of “technology” - almost 2380 years old and … still counting

by Deleted user -

There is some truth in these words. 

Some people will see the opportunity to take a shallow approach to learning if they can read it up later.

But major advances require it to be written down because sometimes brilliance misses generations through war or famine or serendipity.

The benefit has been worth the cost!

In reply to Deleted user

Re: A very old discussion about the nature of “technology” - almost 2380 years old and … still counting

by Deleted user -
John Millington Synge writes about his visits to the Aran Islands to learn Irish. He points out the fact of an evening with a man who spoke only Gaelic, and was not literate in that, but apart from knowing the things necessary to make a living in the edge of Europe, had by heart a thousand stories. The Navajo of North America used also and may still rely on memory to transmit the narratives of origin and belonging and the rituals of the people. I think also in fiction of Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, and remember how much history I learned from the songs and stories of my Irish grandmothers. You might wish also to consider the works of the great oral historians of the last half century, in particular in those areas where written records are corrupt or non existent, sush as Luisa Passerini's work on Italy under fascism. There is also the difference between data, information and knowledge to consider. Best wishes for your work.