Tried With Fire

I started listening to Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2000 Years by Tom Standage. It is a popular history of human communication beginning with ancient times until the present. It's been an interesting "read" because even though technology has changed, human nature has not. The following snippets are from memory since I don't have a written text in front of me. In Ancient Greece, the use of spoken language and subsequent memorization was the way information was transmitted and preserved. Then came the the new fangled idea of writing ideas permanently down on a scroll. Horrors! Plato decried this arguing that people would stop thinking if they could just look something up in a book rather than remembering it. Sound familiar? Graffiti in Ancient Rome was quite common and not considered vandalism. The specimens that have survived are from excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were preserved by the ash of Vesuvius. There is everything from ...

"In Plato's Phaedrus , we hear Socrates describing how a king from Egypt called Thamus informed the god Theuth that the phonetic alphabet was not so great a gift. The god was particularly chuffed about this new technology, which he delivered to poor, illiterate humans, bragging that writing would make the memories of Egyptians more powerful and that it would supercharge their wit. King Thamus shrewdly replies: O most ingenious Thoth… 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 the truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and generally know nothing. Was there ever a finer description of Google?" The...

I finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (1931-2003). It is a thought-provoking book that puts forth the argument that television, with its use of images to convey information versus the printed word, has radically changed how we think, learn and assess what is true. Given that the book was published in 1985, you could substitute the Internet or any of the other technological wonders of the 21st century, and the argument would still be just as valid. Although Postman was a humanist, the book was helpful to me as a parent, home educator, and Christian, because we are charged to "not be conformed to this world." Therefore as a believer, I need to closely examine the effects of entertainment-driven technology, the very thing on which the world thrives. Yes, there are benefits from technology, but there are risks as well. The presence of technology has a pervasive and invasive presence in every part of our lives which may not always be a good thing, particul...