Schrift

Reading presented Socrates with a new version of Pandora’s box: once written language was released there could be no accounting for what would be written, who would read it, or how readers might interpret it.6

As Socrates put it, “once a thing is put in writing, its composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parents to come to its help, being unable to defend or help