What I found most interesting about not only chapter 1 of Borsuk’s book but also Thursday’s class was the multiple fears of the advancement of literature from various influential people of their time. Socrates and Plato were named in both and in the Book, Borsuk says, “The great thinkers of Ancient Greece, in fact, mistrusted writing as a technology that would destroy the oral arts of debate and storytelling on which they based their sense of the world, of philosophy, of time and space.”(55). In class professor Pressman commented on the close relationship writing has to politics and it seems like Plato, Socrates, Hugo, Nietzsche, Derrida, along with many others had the same fears we seem to now have today, yet, they are remedial.

The anxieties, fears, and worries that plague us about our future have already had a host. The same fears that created a disdain of the written word for Socrates, “for separating ideas from their source-“, are now ones many of us today fall for (Borsuk 55). If I remember correctly, it’s true what Socrates said about dialogue being stronger than the written word. Today, for example, many forms of media and new websites use ‘clickbait’ titles and false narratives, not to seek the truth, but to profit and entertain. Furthermore, the popularity in audio books and podcasts is also a bit worrying. It was very eye opening and comforting even, to see these great thinkers and philosophers of the past share many of the same feelings I did. That weariness of change, the unavoidable path forward, to progress, to the future unknown; “Their concerns echo contemporary anxieties about the ways digitally mediated reading and writing shortens our attention spans, and ability to engage deeply with texts (Borsuk 59). It is somewhat strange to read that. That our contemporary worries have also been ancient ones just remediated. It reminds me about our conversation about book history in general. That these ways of linear thinking serve no purpose other than to blind us to the whole picture. And its important to note that, “writing itself fundamentally changed human consciousness, much as our reliance on networked digital devices has altered us at the core.” (Borsuk 60). Progress demands change and with that change come both good and bad, “The thing we fear is precisely what worried the Ancients: mediation.” (Borsuk 60).

While time has only proven that the written language has helped develop human civilization to grow exponentially in every way, so too will the number of problems multiply. And it is precisely here that worries me, but also those before. That especially now, we cannot trust what we read and see, we have to question everything and remain aware. A worry that many of us have today but that was long ago held by a greek: “At the root of Socrates’s accusation lies a vision of writing as a technology that interposes between thinker and thought, severing the two and allowing them to travel independently of one another.” (Borsuk 60).