. Published by ECW Press in 2017.

Each of the paradigm shifts that pushed human communication forward has met with stiff resistance. Even the invention of writing. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, such resistance seems incomprehensible, almost ridiculous. What kind of knob would say no to the written word?

Socrates, for one. In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell the story of the ancient Egyptian god Theuth, who invented geometry and astronomy, games of chance, and—his greatest invention of all—writing. Thamus, king of the Egyptians, admired all of these gifts except writing, which he refused to teach to his subjects, claiming that “if men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.”

Socrates tells the story to explain why he refuses to “write” his thoughts “in water” with pen and ink, “sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others.”

According to Plato, Socrates called writing “in-human.” In striving to establish outside the mind that which can truly live only inside the mind, writing transforms thought into object, no longer of flesh and blood. Reading, in his view, was just as despicable. Because readers would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

Almost 2,000 years later, the advent of the printed book provoked the same response. The humanist Italian editor Hieronimo Squarciafico was at first enthusiastic about books. But in 1477, less than a decade after Gutenberg died, Squarciafico wrote an imagined discourse between the spirits of great authors passing their time in the Elysian Fields. Some authors lauded the new printing press, but others complained that “printing had fallen into the hands of unlettered men who corrupted almost everything.” Yet even the naysayers felt they had to accept Gutenberg’s invention: “Their works would perish if they were not printed, since this art compels all writers to give way to it.”

This sounds a lot like what writers today say about digital books, and self-publishing, too. They are the modern incarnations of that Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci, who said that a mechanically printed book should be “ashamed” to be set beside a hand-copied manuscript.

Squarciafico has become famous for his aphorism, “Abundance of books makes men less studious; it destroys memory and enfeebles the mind by relieving it of too much work.” It is well to remember that he wrote this at a time when books were still enormous, chained to lecterns, long before Manutius released them to everyone’s hands with his para forma.

The rotting impact of reading on the mind wasn’t the only criticism levelled against books. Inexpensive and easily available, books would devalue the work of scholars and undermine religious authority, spreading sedition and debauchery. And perhaps these critics were right. Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses would not have spread so far and wide without a printing press to publish his posters, and it’s unlikely the Enlightenment would have had the impact it did without the rise in literacy that the printing press made possible.

But is it true that writing and reading books have stolen our memories, made us stupid?

That argument was levelled against calculators (a small handheld device that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide at the press of a button). Keep them out of schools! our parents said. Children will lose the ability to add up long columns of numbers in their heads! Which they probably did, since that skill quickly became redundant in the face of a machine with the ability to calculate complicated equations in seconds.

With the Internet fully upon us, the same old criticisms are being voiced once again. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr asked in the Atlantic. “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.”

I know exactly what he means. I feel it, too. Even writing these short vignettes, I interrupt myself a dozen times to check facts, scan incoming email, confirm my bank balance. My brain functions seem less linear, more scattered. More nimble, too, if I’m honest. Less able to focus, perhaps, but better able to make connections. In his seminal folklore text, The Singer of Tales, Albert Lord suggests that the act of writing drives us to a linear way of thinking, that oral memory is patterned differently than written memory. Perhaps computers are taking us back to a different—not necessarily inferior—spatial form of memory.

For at least five years, bloggers have been monitoring the phenomenon. “I used to be a voracious reader. What happened?” one moans. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” another admits. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” “What if I do all my reading on the Web not so much because the way I read has changed, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

It’s a terrifying thought. Clearly, as a species, we aren’t crazy about change. We resist it at the very moment we embrace it. And we are right. There are monsters as well as ghosts in the machine. We know this from experience (even if we don’t remember it). Nicholas Carr cites the example of the mechanical clock, which came into common use about a hundred years before the printing press. In his book Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford describes how the clock “disassociated time from human events” and “helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The scientific mind with its measurable truths evolved in part because of the mechanical clock. A significant benefit, to be sure, but we lost something, too. We stopped paying close attention to our bodies and to the physical world around us. We eat at noon even when we aren’t hungry. We go to sleep at ten p.m. whether the summer sun is still shining in our northern sky or we are pulling up the blankets under a dark winter moon.

Reading onscreen may indeed be turning us into informational magpies, and writing probably did weaken the part of our minds in which long poems and speeches were stored and shared orally with friends and family. My nostalgic self yearns for what I can only imagine: a huddle of loved ones, all eyes fixed on the storyteller, knowing as I listen that the story this time won’t be the same as when I last heard it, or the next time, either, every moment fresh, unique, pure in itself.

Socrates and Squarciafico knew something in their bones that we no longer believe. Or at least, it is a truth that we fight against: life is ephemeral, it is different one millisecond to the next. No amount of pressing words onto paper or digitizing them on a screen will ever stop that flow.