Theme Of Censorship In Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451, Censorship, and the Internet

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is a sci-fi novel that warns on how technology will regress human society. In the novel, almost all of society is anti-social and shallow. They are all so preoccupied watching their parlor walls, and listening to their seashells. While there are some shockingly similar parallels to today’s time, such as the parlor walls being analogous to giant flat-screen televisions, the seashells representing phones and earbuds, and society acting like the stereotypical millennial, sci-fi novels are not meant to predict something as unpredictable as the future. Bradbury’s view of the future, and by extension, Fahrenheit 451, is the product of its own time, for which is why he is

Futures are volatile things. Instead, what speculative fiction is about is to warn: to be a cautionary tale. As Neil Gaiman writes in the foreword of the book, “What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future but the present--taking and aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle, from a different place.” Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 not as a way to warn future generations, but to warn his current generation. Many of Bradbury’s warnings are still applicable fifty years later, but not all are impervious to time. In the book, “And here was the gas station,, its attendants busy now with customers. …. Through the aluminum wall he heard a radio voice saying, ‘War has been declared.’” That paragraph is largely dated. Gas attendants are a rarity and luxury these days, and radios are not lying about around these days. His warning of technology regressing society is dated and obsolete now, much like the gas attendants and the radio. As tech pioneer Steve Jobs said, “[technology] is a field where one does one’s work and in ten years, it’s obsolete.” Technology smited the radio, but there was a new invention ready to take it over, a technology that Bradbury

It is simply a fact of nature. In Modern Technology is Changing the Way Our Brains Work, Says Neuroscientist by Susan Greenfield, she describes the world today as “gadget-filled [and] pharmaceutically-enhanced.” The internet has affected virtually every aspect of life. It is perhaps the greatest conduit of information and entertainment in world history. Greenfield writes that a large amount of personal information is stored on the internet, but there is much more to that. It is not just personal information, everything is stored on the internet. In an interview by CBS News with Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt, he said that, in short, internet could make censorship impossible. With the internet, it is no longer possible to ban a book or sequester an idea. Schmidt then later adds that even though in China, where they have censored American social networks on the internet, they still have their own social networks, with over four hundred million people online. “It will be difficult to suppress legitimate speech, legitimate discussion on broad social networks.” says Schmidt. The internet is not only independent of location, but irrelevant of it. A wire goes to the internet, where is the other