Coming Back to Plato: Theuth’s myth as metaphor for the formative implications

of the new communication technologies

Piercesare Rivoltella, Università Cattolica – Milano

[International Symposium Life-long learning in the Information Society: new

technologies Aagainst exclusion, Valladolid, 26-28 semptember 1996]

The Phaedrus has been dated back to Plato’s maturity mainly on the basis of two
reasons: for its reference to the two moments of the dialectics, the synagogical one and
the diairetical one1 (265c-266d), also illustrated in the late dialogues of Sofista and
Politico, (Titolo inglese?) and for the fact that some of its themes, such as the
tripartition of the soul, clearly refer to the Republic, Plato’s dialogue of maturity par
excellence.
For literary critics this dialogue represents one of Plato’s most lyrical and refined
works --think about the idylliac starting with its extraordinary description of the rural
atmosphere or the final parting from the reader with the famous prayer of the
philosopher. From a philosophical point of view, the hermeneutical tradition has
considered this work as a sort of manifesto of Plato’s philosophy, also summarized
with great precision and poetical dignity by Socrate’s speech (243e - 257b). Finally,
rhetoricians have regarded the Phaedrus as a treatise on the methodology of making
speeches and, in particular, as a confrontation between the logographic method of
oratory and sophistics and the psycagogical method of the socratic-platonic tradition.
In the last decade the Phaedrus’ fame has been increased by a new interest for the
myth closing the dialogue, --Theuth’s myth-- where Plato talks about the legendary
origins of writing. This new interest is mainly given to the Tubinga School and Hans
Krämer according to whom this dialogue, as well as the Epistle VII, represent Plato’s
two self-declarations of the existence of a body of unwritten doctrines which he chose
to teach only orally at the Academia for his most affectionate disciples. Additionally,

1These are the two forms of thought which Plato considers as constitutive of his own methodology of
research: an elementarizing process, the diairesis?, which reduces complex data to their ultimate
elements; a generalizing process, the sinagoghé?, which moves from the particular to the universal.
We’ll talk more about the cognitive value of these processes especially with regard to Plato’s
relationship with writing. See also KRÄMER, 1982; 161ss.; REALE, 1987; 268ss.
critics such as Erick Havelock, Derrick deKerkhove, Walter Ong and Neil Postman,
have read this myth as a powerful metaphor of the deep processes of change which
take place at the socio-political level when a new communication technology starts
replacing a traditional one.
It is precisely from this last point of view that we are going to interrogate the platonic
text having in mind two particular concerns: reflect on the technological transformation
itself and raise some of the interpellations it implies with regard to the exigences and
processes of formation.

1. Authentic and inauthentic communication

In order to fully understand the importance of Theuth’s myth we need to focus briefly
on its background, that is Plato’s interest in discriminating between “good” and “bad”
speech. What conditions are to be satisfied when making a speech? In other and more
general words, under what conditions does authentic communication take place?
To answer the Phaedrus identifies four fundamental rules of method which
demonstrate how Plato’s concern, far from being superficially rhetorical, is profoundly
involved with the ultimate antropological roots of communication:
1) first of all, the speaker needs to know what he/she is communicating. As Plato’s
says: “There is not and there will never be (...) a true art of speaking which does not
touch truth” (260e). In other words, the need for concept and definition;
2) the speaker needs to know also the soul of the person he/she is addressing: “And
for the speech to be good and beautiful, isn’t it necessary that the soul of the person
speaking knows all the truth about the things he is going to talk about?” (259e). This
typically platonic indication may be interpreted in two ways. From a pragmatic point of
view, it stresses the necessity for the speaker to know his/her audience in order to be
able to use the right topics and hence establish an effective communication. At a deeper
level, it recalls the platonic speech about orality which closes the dialogue by alluding
to that practice of “writing in the soul” which only constitutes authentic
communication2;
3) moreover, the speaker must guarantee an internal balance among the various
components of the speech. Plato here uses the famous metaphor of the organism and

2 “Conversely, the one who thinks that clarity and integrity and seriousness only exist in the speeches
given in a teaching context aimedd at people’s learning, that is in the speeches about the right and the
beautiful and the good really written in the soul (...) well, Phaedrus, that is the man you and I would
like to become” (277e - 278a).
its parts: “every speech must be composed just like a living being with a body so that it
does not appear without head or feet and all the middle and extreme parts properly
combine either reciprocally or with regards to the whole” (263c);
4) finally, the development of the argument must follow the double movement we
were referring to earlier. The first moment, from the particular to the universal, is that
of definition, i.e. “to reach a single Idea by grasping with a general view the things
dispersed in different ways and, in order to clarify, progressively define the single
things one is going to teach about”3 (265d). The second moment, reciprocal to the first
one, requires the capacity to “divide according to the Ideas, on the basis of the
articulations they share for their nature, trying not to break any part, like a bad carver
would do” (265d). It is precisely in this double movement of argumentation, based on
the unwritten and informing both Aristotle’s philosophy and Neoplatonism, that resides
the activity of the dialectical person, i.e. the philosopher.

In short, if we are to reformulate as practical rules the characteristics which according

to Plato lead to a well done speech and hence to authentic communication, we could
express them in the following terms:
1) always know what you are talking about;
2) always know the person you are talking about;
3) always know the single parts both in relation to each other and to the whole speech;
4) always define the object of your speech in order not to forget anything important.

Not everyone is, of course, going to follow Socrate/Plato’s advice. In fact, some
philosophers (the Sophists) are convinced that the criteria for good communication are
precisely the opposite. Plato identifies these criteria with great lucidity, partly finding
them in the speech by Lysias which gives rise to the dialogue.
First of all, the Sophists, or “logographes” as Plato scornfully defines them anticipating
his criticism to writing4, believe “that the person who is going to become an orator

3 Socrates already had centred his method of research on the importance of definition, deserving by
Aristotle in his Metaphysics the acknowledgment of having introduced the concept in the Greek
philosophy. Here Plato is evindently following his master’s teaching.
4 Originally the term sophistès was used to indicate the person who knows, the learned one. Its
negative connotation is due to Socrates who harshly criticised the new professional figure of the
philosopher rapidly becoming popular in Athens around the IV century a.C.: an intellectual who, on
payment, would provide politicians with his rhetorical competence and argumentative ability. Here
Plato is again following the socratic teaching.
does not need to learn the things which are really right but just the things which seem
right to the people who are going to judge them” (260a); therefore, “far from
expressing anything sound or true, they just glorify themselves especially when, having
deceived some shrimps, have reached a high popularity among them” (242e - 243a).
Moreover, the motivation inspiring the Sophists is never a pedagogical one, but rather
merely opportunistic: their purpose is not the education of their interlocutor, but just
their own fame --“you forget that the most ambitious politicians love writing speeches
and transmit to posterity their writings” (257e) or their personal interest -- “Don’t you
understand that what you find at the very beginning of something written for a
politician is just the name of the praiser?” (258a).
Finally, their methodology is a mere exercise of technicism deprived of all authentic
communication5

There are, therefore, two conflicting modalities of communication: one belongs to the
person who really cares about truth and seriousness, the other is characterized by
superficiality and idle rhetoric. Of course, these considerations apply both to the
written and oral speech. The introduction of Theuth’s myth gives Plato the opportunity
to verify whether orality and writing share the same importance or rather it is possible
to find some reasons for stating the superiority of the former over the latter: that is the
crucial turning point of the dialogue and also our thematic object here.

2. Theuth’s myth: orality and writing

The Egyptian god Theuth, Hermes for the Greeks and Mercury for the Latins, goes to
Thebes to pay a visit to Thamus and offer him his inventions. Thamus, having weighed
their vices and virtues, expresses his opinion either declining or accepting them. When
describing his invention of writing, Theuth’s speech is like that of a proud father
talking about his beloved son: “This knowledge, my king, will make the Egyptians
wiser and more capable of remembering since with it they have found the pharmakon
of memory and wisdom” (274e). But Thamus readily answers: “Oh, very ingenious
Theuth, there are people who can create arts and people who can instead judge
whether such arts are going to harm or advantage those who will use them. Now,
being the father of writing, you have just told me exactly the opposite of its real worth”
(274e - 275a). He then indicates what he thinks are the limits of Theuth’s invention.
First, the written speech does not increase people’s memory, but rather oblivion “since,

5 Cf. 266d - 267e.

by relying on writing, they will get used to remember from the outside by means of
exterior signs6, and not from the inside, by themselves” (275a). Writing has therefore
just a hypomnematic value: it only helps to save the informations so that they can be
more easily recalled to memory! To have a better understanding of what Plato means,
think about the nature of a personal note: it may be helpful to the person who writes it
and as such a single word or a simple graphic symbol may prove sufficiently eloquent;
but if submitted to another person trying to trace back its allusions, it may result
obscure and ultimately unusuful.
Furthermore, the written speech, having, as said, just a hypomnematic value, does not
generate wisdom in the readers, but the mere illusion of it: “by becoming listeners of
many things without instruction, they will come to believe they know many things,
whereas in fact, as it often occurs, they do not actually know them” (275a-b). Those
who already know through dialectics, which takes place only orally, may in fact use
writing to review their knowledge, but those who, to acquire some knowledge, base
themselves just on reading will never succeed in reaching a truly wise knowledge7.
Plato’s critiques are further reinforced by Socrates.
The written speech --he argues-- has no possibility to discriminate between the reader
who can be addressed and the reader who cannot and if it is interpreted uncorrectly it
does not have any instrument to orient the reader’s job: “And once a speech has been
written down, it unrolls everywhere, ending up in the hands of those who care or those
who don’t, and it does not know whom it can talk to and whom it cannot. And if
someone offends or unjustly outrages it, it always needs the help of the father since it is
not able to defend or help itself on its own” (275e).
Finally, and precisely for all these reasons, the written speech has no seriousness. To
support this argument Plato brings into play the famous image of Adonis’ gardens, that
is those recipients where the Greeks, during the summer, would plant some seeds
which would quickly sprout thanks to water and summer heat but that, in a similarly
quick fashion, would in a few days wither. Such is the allegory of the precocious death
of Adonis, Aphrodite’s lover. Like with Adonis’ gardens, whenever “[the person who

6 Italics in all platonic quotations are ours.

7 Here Plato is referring to his ideal pedagogical model based on an in-presence relation
teacher/disciple and on a collaborative research program between them as a working methodology.
Faithful to the pythagoric ideal of the bìos theorethikòs and to socratic teachings, Plato had based his
didactics at the Academia on the co-habitation between teacher and disciples, a sort of intellectual
novitiate where interaction, dialectics and the living example are fundamental and totally
unreplaceable by the simple reading of books.
knows] will plant and write the gardens of writing he will do it just for fun, storing
material he can recall to memory when he grows old and tends to forget things”
(276d), but certainly such person will not rely on writing for the really important
matters. In other words, since the reading of written text is functional to a quick but
ephemeral kind of information, one will not certainly recur to writing to communicate
deep and important thoughts which are not to be rapidly forgotten.

3. Plato, the son of writing

Even from a cursory analysis of these critiques to writing we can conclude that, as also
suggested by several authors interested in the psychodynamical aspects of oral and
literary cultures and in the passage from the one to the other8, Thamus’ and Socrates’
objections are in a way similar to those directed today against the media (particularly
the computer) by some authors and a part of the public opinion.
Media are inhuman since they try to re-create from outside the mind what is only
possible from within it: think about the recent developments in AI, the research on the
interactions in natural language between human beings and machines, or the new
possibilities for data elaboration offered by the last generations of software. Plato’s
claim about the peculiarly human character of memory prophetically embodies the
apocalyptical opinion of those who are today concerned about living in a world
governed by machines and crowded with replicants which only the unreplaceability of
memory can distinguish from humna beings, just like in Scott’s Blade Runner.
Moreover, media destroy the memory of those who use them, weaken their mind
supplanting the capacity to reflect and conceptualize with a mere videogame skill, just
like pocket calculators disaccustom to count. A distinction seems to emerge between a
superficial, ephemeral, banal media knowledge and a deep, long-lasting and serious
knowledge literary knowledge.
Finally, media produce passive texts which do not answer and not know how to defend
themselves. Although progress in the research on interactivity has basically modified
the processes of message reception by calling forth the reader’s integrative
contribution, undoubtedly the computer, like all the other new communication
technologies, is a cold medium and as such it requires a high level of competence in
order to be efficiently used.

8 Cf. DeKerkhove, 1990; Havelock, 1963, Ong, 1982; Postman, 1992.

Plato, feels that the the world he belongs to --the world of orality-- is threatened by
writing and therefore defends it just like some today do, feeling that the literary culture
and its values are risking to be totally eclipsed by the electronic era.
However, the question remains that, “in order to give more pregnancy to his
objections, Plato presented them in a written form; (...) similarly, all criticism to
computers is circulated through articles and other written material mainly edited and
composed on computer terminals”9. Plato attacks writing in a dialogue by using writing
itself, just like contemporary apocalyptical critics compose on a computer keyboard
their objections to electronic communication. More than being a mere contradiction,
that is an interesting symptom: Plato, although feeling like an outsider in the world of
writing, is in fact already part of it. Similarly, although being aware of its risks, we are
so used to the computer that we are no longer able to write using a pen.
But there is more to this. Writing not only is the instrument Plato uses to wheel his
critiques, but also that which what makes him possible to fomulate such critiques in the
first place. Analytical thinking, based on division, on the anatomy of the real, does not
belong to oral cultures being a consequence of the advent of writing: “as Havelock has
brilliantly demonstrated, all platonic epistemology is unconsciously founded on a
negation of the old world of oral culture, a mobile and hot one, the world of personal
interactions, represented by those poets he had banned from his Republic”.10
Abstraction, conceptualization, the cycle analysis-synthesis, argumentation through
causal links, these are all cognitive skills induced by the affirmation of the phonetic
alphabet in the Western world and precisely in Greece around the VIII-VII century
a.C. As a matter of fact with the phonetic alphabet thinking starts emancipating itself
from any representative reference to reality11 (conceptualization) and requiring the
analytical recognition of the single phonemes (analysis) and their mutual connection
(causality, synthesis).

9 Ong, 1982; 121.

10 Ong, 1982; 121.
11 As DeKerkhove suggests, 1990, the phonetic alphabet, differently from syllabic or iconic ones
(hieoroglyphics, idiographs), is characterized by a double articulation: whereas in the latter reading is
functional to the iconic-representative recovery of a meaning which is nothing but the object
designated by the grapheme, in the former meaning is constituted by the concept evoked by the
particular combination of signs through which the object has been codified. Among all sorts of
writing, the phonetic one only recalls concepts and not real objects.
Therefore, Plato, in the very moment he is advocating for orality against writing, “is
already totally ‘possessed’, if not ‘programmed’, from the devil of writing”12: his own
philosophy cannot exist but in a culture based on writing!
The confirmation to this is given by Socrates who, when teaching Phaedrus the correct
way to produce speeches, exposes four criteria13 which assume “a mental space already
set and no longer in fieri”14 and clearly resemble the principles of the cartesian
method15

4. Plato, the prophet of technology

Not only is Plato the unaware son of writing, but he also demonstrates a profound
knowledge of the psychodynamics of literary communication whose constitutive
characteristics and advantages he indicates with respect to oral communication (228 A-
B; p.539).
First of all, the literary text is always available to the reader since, differently from the
oral text belonging to the ephemeral, it is recorded on a piece of paper. This gives the
reader the possibility to concentrate his/her attention on the page or parts of it (“he re-
examined those passages he was more interested in” -- 228b) re-elaborating them in a
more personal way. According to this perspective --that is in terms of a more integral
recovery and reception of the wholeness the author is trying to communicate-- writing
is definitely more functional than orality.
Moreover, with literary communication the enunciation time and the reading time do
not coincide. In fact the reader may orient the rythym of reading according to his/her
personal time and, more importanly, according to his psycho-physical condition (“being
tired, he went for a walk” - 228b).
Finally, not being constrained by the physical contiguity between author and reader,
literary communciation emancipates the reception of the text from the presence of its

12 DeKerckhove, 1990; 43.

13 As it can be easily observed, the correspondence between the platonic criteria for making a good
speech and the rules of method Descartes illustrates in the second part of his Discourse is indeed
almost textual: “1) ...Do not ever accept as true a thing you do not certainly know as such...; 2) ...
divide every single problem you are examining in several smaller parts...; 3) ...develop your thinking
with order...; 4) ...in any case proceed through exaustive enumerations and general reviews in order to
make sure that you have omitted absolutely nothing”.
14 Cf. supra par. 1, “Authentic and inauthentic communication”
15 DeKerckhove, 1990; 43.
author making it available to reading at any time, any place (hadn’t been Lysias’ speech
written down, Phaedrus couldn’t have listened to it but through Lysias’ voice). In this
case, the absence of the father, which in commenting Theuth’s myth is presented as one
of the major limits of writing, ends up being one of the very reasons which make it
much worthier than orality.

The conclusion we might at first sight draw is that Plato is maybe a bit confused: he
argues against writing but uses it; he praises orality but lucidly indicates its limits with
respect to writing; he supports the value of oral teaching in philosophy but realizes that
writing is the condition of possibility of philosophy in the first place. How can these
contradictions be interpreted?

Evidently, a sophisticated and speculative mind such as Plato’s cannot be so easily

accused of lacking sagacity. Indeed, the entire platonic experience, and Theuth’s myth
in particular, constitutes an extraordinarily lucid theorization of the changes occurring
when a new communication technology breaks into a given social scene without yet
replacing entirely the existing ones: in other words, Plato, living in the
semialphabetized Greece of the V century a.C., defends orality from writing, although
he intuits that it is going to be replaced by a new human universe depending precisely
on writing16. In his literary fiction, he perfectly embodies the conflicting attitude of
those who enthousiastically salute technological innovation, on one hand, and those
who fear its implicit risks, on the other: Theuth, the integrated one, a sort of
“technophile”, can only see the positive aspects of technology and, like all inventors,
ignores “the social and psychological --i.e. ideological-- implications of their
discoveries”17; Thamus, the apocalyptical one, “a prophet who looks in one direction
only”, can only see the negative consequences.

Thamus is not much concerned by what people are going to write, but rather by the
very fact that people are going to write in the first place. It is not good or bad use
which makes technology positive or negative --as the weberian thesis about the
neutrality of science seems to suggest: use is in fact conditioned by the structure of
technology itself. Indeed, the medium is the message. The emergence of any new
technology ends up producing a deep transformation of the meaning of words; it
changes our way of thinking about knowledge and truth; it alters our weltanshauung

16 Such is Postman’s interpretation based on H. Innis’ observations.

17 Postman, 1992; 15.
“new technologies alter the structure of our interests, what we think. They also alter
our symbols: what we think with. And, finally they alter the nature of our social
context: the arena where our thought develop”18.
Technological transformations, as Postman suggests, is neither an addition, nor a
subraction: they are ecological. “I use the term ‘ecological’ in the same way the
environmental scientists do”19. When a new technology arrives, it neither eliminates
nor adds nothing to our socio-cultural system: it simply changes everything!

5. The new media environment

In trying to homologate to Plato’s experience our condition of witnesses of the passage

from a literary to an electronic society, the following questions arise: what are the main
characteristics of the environment created by the new communication technologies?
And more specifically, what is its influence on the role and function of education and
formation?

a) the availability of knowledge

The first characteristic of the new communication technologies regards the greater
availability of knowledge. Plato sustained that most people, because of writing, would
have ended up “believing to know many things, while actually they do not know them”.
Writing emancipates the subject from the necessity to remember making easier the
storage and transmission of the cultural patrimony and at the same time expanding the
limits of what can be transmitted to posterity. Not only is knowledge rescued from
oblivion, but it can now builds up on itself; not only has writing released human beings
from the obligation to remember proper of the oral culture, but it also makes
remembering materially impossible: the literary person is no longer able to recall by
heart all his/her knowledge. The age of great syntheses, when the poets’ formulas still
succeed in epitomizing an entire culture has been progressively replaced by a new
cultural reality marked by a growing gap between what can be potentially known and
what is actually known, a gap which the metaphor of the library or the encyclopedia
effectively illustrates.
In the electronic age, such gap is getting deeper and deeper reaching its utmost
consequences. The new techniques for storing (through CD-roms) and circulating

18 Postman, 1992; 20.

19 Postman, 1992; 18.
(through networking) data expand the potential for knowledge up to the utopian limits
of total availability, a completely transparent and interconnected society where every
single part contains informations about all the other ones. The metaphor which best
illustrates this new society is that of the hologram: “Not only every part of the world,
but the world as a whole is more and more present in all its single parts. And that
occurs at the level of nations and peoples as well as individuals. Just like every point of
an hologram contains informations about the whole it belongs to, similarly every
individual receives or consumes the informations and substances coming from the
whole universe”20.

b) the separation between physical and social space

“And once a television program is broadcasted, it unrolls everywhere, ending up in the

hands of those who care and those who don’t, and it does not know whom it can show
itself to and whom it cannot”. Such can be the modern version of the platonic
observation about the impossibility for the written document to choose its own
receiver. Electronic media, television in particular, abolish that identity between
physical and social space which used to characterize communication before their
advent: a telephone call, a network interaction, a teleconference link are all possible
ways of communication even if the two interlocutors are not physically present in the
same place. In each of these cases, the electronic media create another place, a virtual
and not a physical one, which is the social place of the communication contact they
make possible.
Actually, a similar situation already existed in the literary age. The simple act of writing
of a letter, for example, does abolish physical distance by creating a kind of
communication which goes beyond the presence of sender and receiver in the same
place: yet it cannot render the hot and personal character of face-to-face interaction,
although it gives the sender a higher control over his/her written document than the
sender of messages via electronic media. In a literary culture, adults exercise full
control over the creation and transmission of knowledge, writing being their
instrument, first because to have access to knowledge it is necessary to acquire some
specific alphabetical competences and second because it is the adults who regulate
younger generations’ reading of certain books rather than others. This power is
increasingly being put into question in the contemporary society of images where

20 Morin. 1993; 22-23.

television and the other electronic media, abolishing all sense of place21, undifferently
address the adult and young generations without being able (nor willing) to select what
can or cannot be shown: literally, images are unrolling in front of everybody’s eyes
making no distinction among their audience!

c) the cognitive re-orientering of the subject

A third important characteristic regarding the new communication technologies is, as

we have elsewhere noted22, the subject’s cognitive re-orientering occurring at least at
three levels.
Whereas in the West language has been evolving in terms of a progressive loss of its
global, synesthetic, multisensory relationship with reality in favour of a symbolical-
conceptual type of thinking, electronic communication, especially the avant-garde of
the new technologies, seems to be leading back to an old sensory relationship with
objects, promoting a sort of re-sensualization of language. Think, for example, about
the interface function in word processing: mouses and tactile/vocal interfaces are
definitely extending knowledge from the abstract level of categorization to the practical
one of sensory contact. Even more radically, in Virtual Reality the tactile dimension is
absolutely functional to the cognitive experience made possible by the machine itself.
This sensory recovery implies two more aspects.

On the one hand, if alphabetical writing, by virtue of its double articulation, had been

progressively emancipating the code from reality, the different forms of electronic

communication seem to be recovering it, although it is a kind of reality which might be

no longer “real”. As a matter of fact, the electronic image, given its high degree of

likelihood, credibility and manipulability, can dispense with the reality it is representing

and indeed propose itself as a new form of reality: the Gulf war, for example, as

broadcasted on TV is absolutely real, yet we have no guarantees that that is the war

being actually fought. The consequence is the jeopadization of the realation reality-

truth on which the whole Western gnoseological tradition has been based for centuries:

in the pre-electronic age what manifests itself as real is also actually real, but in the

electronic age the real, although being absolutely as such, may also turn out to be false.

21 Cf. Meyrowitz, 1985.

22 Enciclopedia dell’educazione religiosa, Piemme, Casale Monferrato 1997.
As a result it maybe only said that in the new cultural horizon the whole categories of

“real” and “false” should undergo a deep critical revision.

On the other hand, it seems that with the electronic communication the conceptualizing
and abstracting tendency of literary thinking is now being inteverted in favor of a new
orality characterized by immediacy, interactivity and intimacy. Thinking is more and
more de-conceptualizing itself, gaining back its original relationship with things as well
as the capacity to proceed by associations and analogies rather than strict formal
implications.

6. A change in the paradigm of formation?

These observations ultimately converge to stress the extraordinary impact of the new
communication tecnologies on the formative processes which are in fact undergoing a
paradigmatic change in their management and organization. Let’s try to identify some
aspects of this change we consider particularly important.

a) The subject’s autonomy

The greater availability of data, the new powerful systems of databasing, the tutorial
character of most softwares and so on, facilitate the supplying of information. Some of
the most important consequences determined by this new situation are: the
emancipation of didactical and formative practices from the traditional teaching places
(for example, companies can train their managers by distributing a CD-rom rather than
organizing a residential course), the affirmation of self-formative practices and long-
distance formation. In other words, the user is now being offered an infinite range of
opportunities. However, precisely because of this wide possibility of choice it is very
important to support and cooperate with those who are responsible of the formative
processes. Activities like on-line navigation or television zapping are extremely
different from the traditional act of reading or listening based on a sequential, linear
scheme. They follow instead a networking, policentered logic: there is not an objective
order for consuming the knowledge stored in the network, but just an infinity of
different points of entry from which it is possible to realize infinitely different reading
journeys. De-textualization and re-textualization are the competences developed:
cutting and pasting are the two majors operations required by this high availability of
knowledge and, not surprisingly, characterize also word-processors. As noted earlier,
technology as also producer of mental schemes.
This particular situation causes a redefinition of the formative intervention in terms of
providing a skill (know how) rather than informations (knowledge): in the society of
communication it is no longer necessary to make available an already existing
knowledge, but to acquire the proper competences in order to be able to interact
correctly with it.

b) the formative policentrism

A more marginal aspect regards, on the one hand, the already mentioned capacity of
electronic media to move beyond their physical space and create a social situation and,
on the other, their high content of information. Media can cooperate with traditional
educative agencies offering a different kind of formation. The “other education”, or
“parallel school”, as media have been defined by virtue of their cultural impact, involve
such a redefinition of the concept of formation that the traditional school system and
the teaching role have been drastically put into question.
The first one --the traditional school system-- having lost its centrality, is not only
assisting to the erosion of its former primacy, but is also experiencing a real crisis in
dealing with a complex reality which is proving extremely difficult to frame from a
curricular point of view. It is ultimately risking to become divorced from the
environment it should serve, and this for several reasons: the anachronistic character of
the images values it proposes; the ageing of its knowledge paradigms and the weak
keenness of curricula; its uncertain organization. These problems are particularly
increased by the resistences that the media environment opposes to a possible
involvement in the school system: the non-exportability of technological rationality in
the schools; the difficulty in teaching the contemporary individual; the ambiguity of
mass communication23.
As for the formators, they are, from their part, registering a complication and partial
restructuring of their tasks (from source of information to mere element of a process)
and in order to deal with it they are adopting two basic attitudes: either refusal, caused
by a sort of inertia to change and technological literacy often masked as a need to
defend some high culture from the corrupting power of the media; or, conversely,
hyperspecialist and hypersectorial training which may generate a loop where the
formation of educators rather than serving its didactic aims is risking to become self-
referential and totally apart from the school system.

23 Ravaglioli, 1993; 114.

c) The adaptation to change

If the new media do open the way to a recovery of the value of the body in the
processes of learning by encouraging analogical vs. conceptual thinking, if they do
provide the subjects with a new autonomous space for the definition of their own
formative itineraries, if they , finally, do challenge all educational institutions to re-think
their space of intervention, therefore, pedagogy cannot but pick up and face as soon as
possible such changes and challenge. To conform oneself to innovation implies, in my
view, at least three things.
To accept, first of all, the call for complexity, to live in a multimedial world, to
experience its reality by operating the necessary cultural and linguistic mediations
among the various subjects of formation. Secondly, to speed up the mechanisms
leading to the formative offer. Acceleration (of exchanges, informations, processes of
projecting) is the general internal law regulating the new communication society: if
formation ignores all this, it is seriously risking to start flying when the sun has already
set, just like Minerva’s owl.
Finally, it is necessary to realize a convergence of purposes and tasks between
academic research and didactic praxis, winning over all previous snobism and
reciprocal fears.

Plato concludes his argument against writing asking Phaedrus a question: “On the
contrary, wouldn’t you justly call a poet, or a speech composer, or a law writer, the
person who, more than composing or writing, is capable of turning over and over again
the things he has composed or written, of cutting and pasting one part to the other?”.
A prophetical image which perfectly describes the modern word-processing activity of
serial writers, ghostwriters or bureaucrats who do not create but simply combine
things. The problem is whether there is something “worthier” than this kind of routine.
But that’s another story concerning the soul of those who write: orality, writing or
computers have nothing to do with it!