Abstract

At the beginnings of Western philosophy, Plato meditated on understanding media. He was so lucky to live before the "great division" between humanities and natural science and to witness the first media revolution, the transition from orality to literacy. The age of print and of books manufactures made us to forget that communication concerns above all authors. Now, however, the internet makes it possible to publish our writings without giving them away: humanities scholars could emerge from nonage and take back all what they delegated to the publishers and their market concern, from which they usually earn very little. Why should they do it? To answer to such a question, this text introduces an ancient platonic argument from the Phaedrus to propose a modern, and political, suggestion.