Plato's criticism on written-texts

Plato criticizes “writing” in Phaedrus. (It takes the form of Socrates recounting to Phaedrus a conversation between the inventor Theuth and the Egyptian king Thamous, but Plato is the actual author.)

The story goes that Thamous expressed himself at length to Theuth about each of the branches of expertise, both for and against them. It would take a long time to go through all Thamous’ views, but when it was the turn of writing, Theuth said, ‘Your highness, this science will increase the intelligence of the people of Egypt and improve their memories. For this invention is a potion for memory and intelligence.’ But Thamous replied, ‘You are most ingenious, Theuth. But one person has the ability to bring branches of expertise into existence, another to assess the extent to which they will harm or benefit those who use them. The loyalty you feel to writing, as its originator, has just led you to tell me the opposite of its true effect. It will atrophy people’s memories. Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make the things they have learnt disappear from their minds. Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. You provide your students with the appearance of intelligence, not real intelligence. Because your students will be widely read, though without any contact with a teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant. And this spurious appearance of intelligence will make them difficult company.’ —Phaedrus, translated into English by Robin Waterfield in 2002 from J. Burnet’s 1901 Greek edition.

A lengthy discussion of related topics follows.

Summary

Main criticisms:

Writing will damage memory by making people rely on external media to remember.
Knowledge acquired by passively reading rather than face-to-face dialogue with a real teacher is not true knowledge. It can therefore make people arrogantly pretend to know, becoming unpleasant company.
Just as paintings look real, writing looks like true knowledge, but you cannot ask a book anything; you can only read the same content repeatedly.
Written texts are like “orphans.” They have no father (the author who wrote them) present and cannot choose their readers.

However, Plato did not reject writing entirely. The obvious example is that Phaedrus itself is written.