ABSTRACT
One of the reasons that it is important to study media is to gauge the effects that various technologies can have upon our everyday lives. A critical theory of media should identify the advantages and utilities that a particular medium offers us, while avoiding the temptation to simply affirm said medium without proper consideration of the ways that it might be harmful to us as individuals or to society as a whole. The possibility of exercising agency within an increasingly dense media environment is reliant upon our capacity to evade the anaesthetic properties of media that would render us docile and subservient in the face of their determinative power. Simultaneously though, it is important to recognize that anxieties over the role of new media in education and knowledge are not at all new – we can find them at least as far back as ancient Greece, the birthplace of the Western philosophical tradition. Although various forms of writing (from the pictographs of the Sumerian cuneiform through to early alphabets) have existed for many millennia, it was in Greece around the fifth century bce that an especially pivotal medium – phonetic writing – really came into its own, beginning to demonstrate a decisive social and cultural impact, and it is at this historical juncture that we will begin our exploration into the intertwined discourses of philosophy and media.
