Since writing was invented, people have complained about it.
"Writing will rot your mind!" the Sumerian scribes said. They preferred memorization.
"Writing will lead you away from wisdom!" the Greek philosophers proclaimed. They preferred discourse.
"Writing will stunt your growth!" my mother said.

Well, she didn't say the last one, but she did tell me to go outside a lot.

These may have been true when writing was a skill learned through painstaking study by an elite few, scratching out on clay tablets or papyrus scrolls or hand-copied parchments. But this is no longer the case. The printing press, widespread education, movable type, postal services, the telegraph, the fax machine, the internet, and the blog have all shown what writing can be.

A persistent asynchronous conversation, globally distributed and freely accessible. We can talk, to anyone, access our collective memories, retrieve the arguments and ideas of those who have came before, digest them, accept them, refute them, synthesize them.

Writing is our dialectic.