How Does Fahrenheit 451 Relate To Technology

Ray Bradbury, the author of the novel Fahrenheit 451, depicts a future society in which people are bombarded with sensation and either cannot or choose not to think for themselves. This is, in fact, what Bradbury believed our actual human society to become. He once said, “We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.” So, not only does Bradbury depict a life without free-thinking and intellectual pastimes in 451, but he also implies that society is already taking this road. In a society with low emphasis on anything involving thinking, one might wonder whether our activities are numbing our brains as demonstrated in 451, or if they are actually promoting our creativity and ability to think freely. In this essay we will depict what society today is like (and how it relates to 451), how that might affect our …show more content…
Well, we certainly have shorter attention-spans because of it; this is just common sense. However, as evidenced by prior experiences, technology makes the idea of actually retaining important knowledge obsolete. For example, one wouldn’t have to know how to fix a flat tire, because information such as that is easily accessible by simply Googling it or looking it up in a manual. However, in certain situations, Google/manuals may not be available, leaving the person to rely on their actual knowledge. Technology is training our brains to view some important information as unimportant, making things more easily-forgotten. This is a significant way in which people could be approaching a “non-thinking society.” Also notable is that those who are caught up in media, reality TV, and the internet have a tendency to be removed from society and more important things. With so many opinions flying around online from so many people, the forming of your own opinion may simply turn into the adoption of what is observed to be the popular