Socrates and Phaedrus

This morning, in my Introduction to Literary Studies class, I read a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, written by Plato. There was a story in it about Theuth, the Egyptian God of writing and Thamous, a king. 

Theuth started the discussion, stating that writing improves intelligence and memory. Thamous disagrees, stating that writing would lead to the loss of memory because people would rely more on aids, making them appear intelligent but they would not be smart in real life. 

Now, my class and I got into a discussion about the downsides of written literature as opposed to oral tradition. The first point was that writing can go anywhere; it can spread to places where it would be inappropriate or irrelevant. Writing is indiscriminate of who it adresses and it is incapable of defending itself. For example, if we were to listen to a speech and we didn't like what someone said, we would talk to that person. But, if it were a book, it could not reply to us. 

Now, these are the topics we discussed, and all of these were derived from the conversation Socrates had with Phaedrus. I really enjoyed the class and wanted to discuss it.