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Preface to Plato (History of the Greek Mind,)

Oral societies, Walter Ong argued, were deeply conservative because knowledge was scarce and fragile. All memory was living memory, and knowledge would die with those who held it if they did not pass it on to another person.

L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City

“The concept of the sacred and the archival is being lost because of the novel environment of the internet.”

-Eric Weinstein

Scribal 500BC to 1550:

Literacy – even when only for social elites – transformed the oral paradigm. Plato's Socrates stood at the transition between the Oral and Scribal paradigms. In the Phaedrus dialogue, Socrates recounts how the Pharaoh explained to Thoth that this invention would destroy our “memory” – pointing towards the fundamental

Oral poetry was not simply a way of telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the classicist Eric Havelock, “a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational

Joshua Foer • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Homeric Greeks valued clichés because not only the poets but the entire oral noetic world or thought world relied upon the formulaic constitution of thought. In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration.

Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong

In talking about these medieval manuscripts, Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker:

Our minds were altered less by books than by index slips.

Which is interesting, recognizing not only the absolute vale of content but also its relational value, the value not just of information itself but also of information architecture, not just of content but also... See more

Maria Popova • Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity

In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent... See more