Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, or Truth of Feeling” explores this concept directly as well. The narrative is split between two stories, one in the past where

Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, or Truth of Feeling” explores this concept directly as well. The narrative is split between two stories, one in the past where a missionary was helping transition a tribe from an oral to a written language and another in the near-future where a device records every moment in a searchable, reviewable way. This is a super cool parallel because many of the problems are the same, but the reader (us! modern day people) is in each part familiar with only one side of the transition. The story defends all sides, so you might leave being convinced that the way we do things today is better, but in the end it is just the familiarity. The reason I thought of this story was due to each “upgrade” making it harder to be unprovably wrong. In an oral tradition, the words are only as good as our memories — written language takes that away. But we can still be wrong about things we do or say — the constant recording of memories (I guess we’re partially there already with video cameras) takes that away as well. There is aesthetic value to be found in being able to not know the truth, to not have to be right to not be wrong.