When people started to read and write, it was not seen universally as a good thing. On the contrary, some people, including Socrates, thought it might be terribly damaging, in the same way that many people today see computer games and text messages as damaging. Socrates came from a culture where you had to remember everything, and he thought that having to memorise things meant you understood them better. Writing things down, he thought,would actually mean writing them down and forgetting them.