Technology Exposed In Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

“Men have become the tools of their tools.” -Henry David Thoreau, a 19th-century American philosopher, described the paradox of men becoming servants to their slaves. This theme of the very culture and lifestyle of humanity being dominated by their technology is also exemplified in the book, Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury in which he describes a dystopia in which technological and political advancements have negatively the culture of that society, an analogy that can be applied today with the large increase in mass media, leading to the downgrade in the insightfulness, usage, and validity of the information we are exposed to on a daily basis. In Fahrenheit 451, Mildred, Montag’s wife, is a foil to Montag in that her total acceptance of society's rules contrast his rejection of them. In multiple instances, she is described as being constantly

On page 45, “Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. There was a tiny dance of melody in the air, her Seashell was tamped in her ear again and she was listening to far people in far places, her eyes wide and staring at the fathoms of blackness above her in the ceiling.” Here Montag comes home to find Mildred once again occupied with the “seashells” a form of advanced technology similar to earbuds today, in which audio is broadcasted through the device. Another example of this is on page 47, “And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a