The Power of Technology The usage of technology–specifically, the internet–has been an ongoing controversial topic, for often people have argued that it is damaging and manipulative to kids and teenagers alike because it is so addictive. In the world of Fahrenheit 451, the government has a ban placed on books, forcing the citizens to turn to other things for entertainment. Perhaps the most popular among the citizens are parlor walls, which engage them in hours of mindless staring at sitcoms which are projected onto the wall-sized television screens. The parlor walls represent how easily the power of technology can be taken advantage of; Bradbury expresses this idea through the obsessive behaviour the citizens show towards these walls. The addictiveness of the parlor walls set a great influence on the relationships between characters in the book, for they disallow emotional bonds to be formed. When Montag comes home after witnessing a woman burn herself for her books, he wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks back to the day when he found his wife Mildred unconscious after swallowing a bottle of pills. He thinks about how if she did end up dying, there would have …show more content…
They know the citizens will follow whatever the parlor walls say, just like how Mildred obeys them when they tell her to diet more or dye her hair or put on more makeup. They are so obsessed with the walls that they will listen to anything they say because they think it is helping them. The most significant bit of the quote, however, is how it describes them as having gray skin, gray eyes, and gray thoughts. Gray, which is a relatively neutral color, shows that they all are thinking the same thing: absolutely nothing. There minds are blank, filled with nothing but what the parlor walls tell them to do. They are really just the government’s robots, programmed to obey everything they