Such as Plato in his Phaedrus, we are nowadays witnesses of a cultural transition. This
transition is from a literary society to a digital one. In this society the organization and circulation
of knowledge and culture is made possible by new technologies like the Internet,
PDAs, and mobiles that are changing our social life and more specifically the function and
the modalities of education.
Plato sustained that most people, because of writing, would have ended up “believing to
know many things, while actually they do not know them.” Writing emancipates the subject
from the necessity to remember making easier the storage and transmission of the cultural
patrimony and at the same time expanding the limits of what can be transmitted to posterity.
So, the age of great syntheses, when the poets’ formulas still succeed in epitomizing an
entire culture has been progressively replaced by a new cultural reality marked by a growing
gap between what can be potentially known and what is actually known, a gap which
is effectively illustrated by the metaphor of the library