If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls;

they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on

that which is written, calling things to remembrance no
longer from within themselves, but by means of external
marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for
memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that
you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by
telling them of many things without teaching them you will
make them seem to know much, while for the most part
they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but
with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their
fellows.
(Plato, Phaedrus 275a-b)





On Phaedrus, Plato suggests that writing is an instrument to forgetfulness instead
of memory. Nevertheless, throughout the centuries personal records have been kept in
diaries and journals not only as a "recipe for reminder" as Plato suggests, but also as a
way of a work of memory. The entry in a diary would represent both the trace of the lived
experience and a trigger to consolidate that experience as an autobiographical or episodic
memory of the writer. Nowadays, with an intense writing activity and the eyes of citizens
of the world glued to the screens of their smartphones, iPads and notebooks, a new
approach to writing as instrument of memory or of forgetfulness needs to be thought. In a
recent interview, the Nobel prize neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel warned about possible
consequences of this intense writing activity and of the use of the internet as a repository
of memory: "We are substituting memory for the access to the Internet. [We] don't have
to remember things, [just] look it up. So this is going to create for young people a
completely new way of using and retaining information. It does create a different mind-
set, and what the consequences of that is just too early to tell." The present paper will
explore the relationship between journal and diary writing and memory as well as the
new ways in which personal writing is exercised with the new technologies. This paper is
part of a current post-doctoral research conducted at Hofstra University, with the
supervision of Thomas G. Couser, on "Time, memory and diary writing"- an
investigation on how memory, as a biological function, could help understand the
nature of diary keeping as a work of memory in writing?