medium_is_the

When reading Medium is the Massage I was immediately fascinated by the quote of Socrates on page 113:

"The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories;
they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves ... You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing."

- Socrates, "Phaedrus"

While Socrates is talking about the alphabet, i immediately had to think about algorithms and the google search engine, it is almost scary how this quote from somewhere around 400 b.Chr can be applied to our present situation.

Not only the content of this quote made me think but also the context. At this point in time the idea of critiquing the alphabet
seams unreal, we have been so accustomed to the alphabet that we can't imagine life without it. So how will this apply to algorithms? Will we get so accustomed to this concept of relevancy that we wont be able to imagine a world without it? And are we already at that point?

For my translation I used spread 12 - 13, 112 - 113 and 114 - 115.
My starting point was the quote of Socrates from page 113.
When reading this quote my mind immediately went to algorithms and the google search engine, hence why I wanted to accentuate this by adding a image of the google search engine.

In this image I used the title of the article on page 115 as a search recommendation, this being a nod to how we get so accustomed to the search engine giving us predictions that we wont be able to come up with basic human actions ourself but need the algorithm to give us the answers.

I also added the first lines of text from page 12, when taking this out of the context of the book the text made me think of the suggestions google gives you when searching. With the last lines insinuating that the algorithm already knows these things about you.