My take away: People often think they know whats best for others and create needless roadblocks in their 'best interest'.
Or the roadblocks were created to address a narrow problem set, while ignoring the broader benefits of doing so. So everyone gets punished in the interests of a few who don't like to read.
> Surely they could have had more nuanced reasons than that?
Their stated reasons were certainly nuanced and fairly well argued. They were also completely wrong, built on a stack of assumptions and biases. The whole thing was just a solid congealed lump of motivated reasoning driven by fear of change.
Plato and Socrates apparently feared literacy in common men, and bemoaned the decline of memorization and the tradition of oral instruction. After all, if you had a scroll, you could reread just the passage you wanted, divorced from it's context in a larger argument! Terrible!
The dangers of cheap books printed by the thousands on Gutenberg's invention were decried in tracts produced unironically on that selfsame malefic device.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, popular novels were the great danger, inflaming the passions of women, agitating men to be unhappy with their lot and make demands of their betters (or conversely encouraging idleness and escapism into fiction).
As far as I know, paperbacks as a format didn't get the same treatment, but cheap pulp magazines and comics certainly did.
And now the Internet is the Big Bad (not too long ago it was television, then transistor radios, D&D, and video games).
Algorithmic news feeds are currently causing problems, but that has more to do with the incentives of the businesses running them than anything inherent in the concept.
It's part of Phaedrus by Plato (one assumes that his portrayal of Socrates' opinions isn't misleading, since we really only know Socrates from Plato's writing):
It did, when it turned out you could game the system to move eyeballs from reality, to fiction that confirmed peoples biases. (both search engines and other content ranking systems).
That's a good point, and undoubtedly true for some. But I honestly believe that the discoverability of knowledge that Internet search enables is the most powerful and beneficial tool humanity has ever made. It certainly is for me personally.
