It's useful to remember that Socrates was contrasting the existing Oral culture vs the emerging Literate Culture (Plato) , and the _enormous_ social differences between them. i.e not just rejecting new technology because it's new.

Unlike Oral cultures where a point of view can be questioned and held accountable, a written version changes these expectations since it can only be conveyed one-way, i.e a trust-me mentality.

Secondly, humans having evolved in an oral world are used to much greater exertions and development of their memory (eg: recalling and narrating complex oral epics) which writing (and later computers) greatly weaken.

Ong makes a similar argument in Orality and Literacy (1982) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7182447-most-persons-are-su...

It feels historically vertiginous to see Socrates weigh in on <artificial> <intelligence> , 2000 years ago. [1]

"And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing"

--

[1] Because words are literally artificial marks on paper, and he's literally [2] questioning their intelligence here.

[2] Except he's not, is he? He's verbally questioning their intelligence, because he's actually opposed to doing anything literally literally. [3]

[3] This is getting me twisted in philosophical knots.

Initially, I thought Socrates' stance on writing was some kind of eccentricity but now that I have seen first hand how the meaning of words can change over time and differ between people and places, I now have a better understanding of how much context is lost in writing.

When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.

When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.

Also, subjective experience-based words like 'difficult', 'easy', 'entertaining', 'funny' or even 'good' and 'evil' can vary widely between individuals. I didn't realize this until I met certain people who had very different values to mine. They had completely different definition of 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong'.

Talking to these people is strange and sometimes uncomfortable because you're using the same language and can 'understand' each other superficially, but you know you're not actually speaking the same language. You know they interpret what you're saying differently; they have fundamentally different goals and beliefs about the world and about you.

For example, some action or belief which might be second-nature to you, might actually be seen as strange and a weakness from the other person's perspective. But there are many, many distortions like this.

In fact, no two humans understand the same language in the same way. Often, what people believe, is shockingly different; you just never realized because you never discussed in depth and never defined your words and broke them down into their atomic parts... And in elite social circles, many taboos exist precisely to prevent any such exploration from occurring as such explorations might jeopardize relationships. Many relationships serve a strategic purpose and aren't about truth discovery.