Communication in Europe and its Influence

Standing on the cusp of this information revolution, Plato saw benefits and liabilities in the transformation. In the utopian vision of his Republic, he has harsh words for both the oral tradition of Homeric verse and the later legacy of dramatists such as Aeschylus, whose writings have poetic overtones. Their emotionality, heavy reliance on sensory experience in describing the world (a signature trait of primary oral languages), imprecise use of language, and ambivalent portraits of the world and the gods Plato saw as exerting a corrupting influence on youth. On the other hand, he did not hold the new literate education, capable of circumventing these conceits, to be without its own limitations. In his Phaedrus, Plato uses a dialogue with Socrates—not a recorded conversation but literary prose imitating speech—to lament the attenuation of memory that is a consequence of literacy. He argues that dependency on an external source, such as writing, will diminish the internal resources of thought and memory and thereby weaken the mind. Also, since the written text is passive, a dialogic give-and-take is not possible. Yet despite these reservations it was writing—phonetic literacy, to be precise—that would facilitate the type of abstractions underlying Plato's philosophy and much of subsequent Western thought.

Alphabetic literacy fostered the gathering of a wide variety of data that would be difficult to retain using the relevance structure of primary oral communication. That this data could be analyzed and preserved for posterity is attested to by numerous texts that have come to us from ancient Greece, among them the geography of Anaximander (610–547 B.C.E.), characterized by a visionary cartographic impulse; the histories of Herodotus (c. 484–c. 420 B.C.E.); Hippocrates' (fl. c. 600 B.C.E.) treatises on medicine; the philosophy of Aristotle (384–322B.C.E.); and the geometry of Euclid (fl. c. 300 B.C.E.), with its verbal arguments as well as figures. To this list must be added the imperial legacy of Alexander the Great (ruled 336–323B.C.E.), abetted as it was by literate administrators.