Our times are very strange-with all the information that is stored virtually everywhere. I was struck by the huge gap between this current situation and a description I'm just reading at the moment in Arendt's “Life of the mind,” where she describes Plato's objections to the written word, though I will just add that this passage refers specifically to writing philosophy :

“For there is no way of putting these things in words like other things that one can learn. Hence, no one who possesses the true faculty of thinking (nous), and therefore knows the weakness of words, will ever risk framing thoughts in discourse, let alone fix them in so inflexible a from as that of written letters...”

...“There is first the fact that writing “will implant forgetfulness”; relying on the written word, men “cease to exercise memory.” There is second the written word's “majestic silence”; it can neither give account of itself nor answer questions. Third, it cannot choose whom to address, falls into wrong hands, and “drifts all over the place”; ill treated and abused, it is unable to defend itself ; the best one can say for it is to call it a harmless “pastime,” collecting “a store of refreshment... against the day 'when oblivious age come' or a “recreation [indulged in] as others regale themselves with drinking parties and the like.”

Of course, Plato was the one writing down Socrates thoughts, and Arendt is writing down her thoughts, which is what I'm reading- but both are thinking of the relation of thought and writing.

It is similar in music, listening to music in one's head is very different from playing it. For example, when I listen to Chopin's Nocturne op. 37 no. 1, I hear the middle part as a choral sang by a choir of men. I don't quite get that effect with the piano, it is difficult to catch that specific color that one finds in one's head.

It is extreme and might not be directly connected to the current subject, but I find it nevertheless interesting to bring here and reflect on. How would we live in a world where things are ephemeral? Where everything is stored in the mind?

I believe one should carefully move and explore the possibilities between those two extremes and see the advantages each brings into one's life, and make accordingly a conscious decision on how to moderate or indulge in one's reliance on writing and other moderns ways through which technology extends our writing possibilities (photographs, videos, etc.)