Story Resources (oral vs written)

According to the text, for much of oral literature, print has been a blessing and a curse. Plato's Phaedrus also considers the negative aspects of writing. Writing does not require us to use and exercise memory to retain the information. If we do not commit something to memory it does not become as much a part of us. Words in a book cannot defend themselves. Words in a storyteller can be flexible and respond to critique. A story in a book indiscriminately displays itself to anyone who looks whether or not it is appropriate to the reader. A storyteller can discern which story a listener would most benefit from.
The text states that no further embellishments or variations will be added to a written story and the story itself must end. The meanings of older idioms are being lost.
There is an implication that it will be more difficult for a teller to augment a story because there will be less need for creativity, people will constantly compare and judge tales according to the written version (perhaps unfairly). ((David Carr wrote an article about this idea in
Moral education at the movies: on the
cinematic treatment of morally
significant story and narrative))
It seems to me that something must be lost either way. In the oral tradition we lose the earliest or oldest or less performed versions. I would guess that the Finnish are losing the meanings of the idioms not because the stories are preserved but because they have fallen out of use. If there were no written record but only oral, we would not have the old idioms because new ones would replace the old ones. Rather than the Finnish losing contact with the older culture, they still have the contact only through the preserved written words but there are few people who understand it anymore. If left to an oral tradition we would truly have lost contact with the older generation but be ignorant about it because storytellers would constantly adapt the stories to contemporary ears.
For example, Shakespeare wrote plays for a listening audience, not a visual audience. But if we relied only on oral tradition, or memory, to preserve the plays we might gradually have lost the style of the writing which more accurately reflects the culture of that time, despite its somewhat inappropriatness for the modern visual audience.