A Look at the Future
It is impossible to know exactly what the future will hold, although many creative minds have tried to depict a possibility. One example of this is George Orwell’s 1984. The novel was written in 1949, and depicts a post war world. The government, known as “The Party”, has total control over all of the citizens, watching and monitoring everything they do. The story follows Winston, a man who attempts to fight his repressors within the rigid confines laid out for him. Ray Bradbury created a very different possibility, creating a dystopia that critiques the overdose of pleasure and censorship of knowledge that is present in today’s society. The plot follows a similar path, telling the story of Guy Montag’s rebellion against …show more content…
Today, history and information are omitted from the news in order hide them from the people, making Fahrenheit 451 a more realistic. In the novel, fast facts are presented to citizens with limited context. To explain this concept to Montag, Beatty, the antagonist, said that people need; "Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!... Whirl man 's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!" (Bradbury, 52). Similar to the desire for mindless entertainment, the people value and the government gives out simple information with limited context. In current society, the government does this, although on a lesser scale, by retaining information that could put them or what they do in bad light. If it progressed further, this form of censorship would resemble that of Fahrenheit 451. Alternatively, 1984 takes the approach of rewriting history as a way of highlighting the greatness of the government. Winston explained it as; “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth” (78). This method of censorship is flawed, and is less likely to be used by a future government. It is far easier to keep people ignorant to what is going on in society than to mislead them. With ignorance, the people do not know what it is they are missing, and can blindly continue to go on with their lives and not question the world around them. Misleading can cause inconsistencies in the information presented to people, which would likely result in the authority of the government being taken into question. A dystopian government would not adopt this practice given the apparent flaws in the structure. The form of censorship seen in Fahrenheit 451 is a more likely path for Canada’s future
It is impossible to know exactly what the future will hold, although many creative minds have tried to depict a possibility. One example of this is George Orwell’s 1984. The novel was written in 1949, and depicts a post war world. The government, known as “The Party”, has total control over all of the citizens, watching and monitoring everything they do. The story follows Winston, a man who attempts to fight his repressors within the rigid confines laid out for him. Ray Bradbury created a very different possibility, creating a dystopia that critiques the overdose of pleasure and censorship of knowledge that is present in today’s society. The plot follows a similar path, telling the story of Guy Montag’s rebellion against …show more content…
Today, history and information are omitted from the news in order hide them from the people, making Fahrenheit 451 a more realistic. In the novel, fast facts are presented to citizens with limited context. To explain this concept to Montag, Beatty, the antagonist, said that people need; "Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!... Whirl man 's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!" (Bradbury, 52). Similar to the desire for mindless entertainment, the people value and the government gives out simple information with limited context. In current society, the government does this, although on a lesser scale, by retaining information that could put them or what they do in bad light. If it progressed further, this form of censorship would resemble that of Fahrenheit 451. Alternatively, 1984 takes the approach of rewriting history as a way of highlighting the greatness of the government. Winston explained it as; “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth” (78). This method of censorship is flawed, and is less likely to be used by a future government. It is far easier to keep people ignorant to what is going on in society than to mislead them. With ignorance, the people do not know what it is they are missing, and can blindly continue to go on with their lives and not question the world around them. Misleading can cause inconsistencies in the information presented to people, which would likely result in the authority of the government being taken into question. A dystopian government would not adopt this practice given the apparent flaws in the structure. The form of censorship seen in Fahrenheit 451 is a more likely path for Canada’s future