What Is Fahrenheit 451 Obsession With Technology

Fahrenheit 451: A Forecast for Where Today’s Society is Headed Imagine a world that is ruled by technology. In which face to face interaction is extinct, and ignorance has destroyed the concept of thought. Does this sound familiar? It should, just take a look at the world around you. Everywhere, every day, all the time, people are texting, tweeting, Facebooking, uploading, updating, et cetera. Every person in the world is connected to some form of technology. Technology has sent the world into a death spiral. Every time someone makes the decision to absorb themselves in technology, rather than have a face to face conversation or a walk in the park, they are taking away from the value of thought. Ray Bradbury saw the direction society was heading …show more content…
Most people spend nearly their entire day connected to technology be it via the seashell radios, or the parlor walls. Some even see the characters on the television as ‘family.’ People’s obsession with technology, both in Bradbury’s society and today’s, is spurred by the need to escape themselves and the world around them. People absorb themselves in technology to keep their mind from dwelling on their world and their soul. They do not want to face themselves, or the dreadful things that they have done like burning books and people, raising sadistic children that murder each other for fun, or starting wars and dropping bombs on innocent people. People run to technology to hide from their problems and its causing society’s issues to magnify. Mildred Montag, the wife of the main character in the novel, is a strong example of this. She is obsessed with technology because she refuses to face herself. When a time comes that she actually does see herself, she tries to kill herself. When men come to pump her stomach, they tell her husband “We get these cases nine or ten a night” (13). So many people try to destroy themselves when they realize how awful their lives are. Today, many people are doing the same, attempting to kill themselves because of the lives they live. Technology is acting as a curtain between people and their soul, and when it is drawn back, people are too afraid of finding their true …show more content…
The narrator, Guy Montag compares these women to a bomb as he describes their tension, their desperation for the television to be switched back on. When Montag leaves the television off, and he actually starts a conversation, the women are shocked, and frankly, appalled by the very thought. Now, obviously the women, and the rest of society, engage in a form of conversation: pleasantries and the like, but nothing to the scale that Montag is trying to elicit. He wants depth and thought into what he is asking them, he even brings up politics to try and start a heated conversation. But the women and society as a whole are just too focused, too absorbed in technology, to be pulled away by tangible, thought-provoking conversation. Society today is much the same. Technology rules the lives of many, taking precedence over most face to face contact and interaction. Talking at the dinner table, around a fire, even just sitting and catching up with family and or friends has fallen victim to the villain that is technology. These days, more teens are likely to text a friend just two tables down from them, then to actually get up and talk to them in person, and adults are not much better. Adults, especially the younger ones, just emerging from the social media craze, are just as active on their phones; they, as a result, are also having less