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...

The quoted Seventh Letter limits the argument to writing about philosophy, not writing about other things: "There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another ..."

There's also the objection to "putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness". If I was being uncharitable I could say that he fears criticism, like he's saying the ideas will be ruined if taken outside of his Svengali-like reality distortion field. (Or more charitably, he wants a good faith environment to discuss them in, instead of exposing them to hostile trolls who just won't get it.)

(This is supposedly a letter written by Plato, but probably is more like fan fiction written by his contemporaries.)

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