Censorship and technology in Fahrenheit 451

Censorship & Technology in Fahrenheit 451

Technology and society: Ray Bradbury's dystopia Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 depicts a nightmare future dystopia where all books are burned by law. In Bradbury's vision, technology has not furthered human progress, rather it has inhibited it. Technology has given human beings the means to destroy new thought, rather than create it. Technology has given human beings the power to watch over one another to the point where privacy is impossible: books are gone, the government knows what every citizen is doing, and interior life and appreciation of nature and beauty are all a thing of the past. And above all else, technology has given human beings the power to destroy the whole human race through weapons of mass destruction.

Bradbury's tale of a forcibly illiterate society is so frightening because throughout history, technology has given us so many tools to further human freedom of expression. Once upon a time, the printing press and other forms of technology enabled human beings to be more articulate, to learn language, and to inhabit the minds of authors. In our own world, the Internet has opened up its users to new ideas and experiences online, all through the spread of words facilitated by technology. Technology and words both facilitate connection: however, technology is only as moral as the individuals who use it. In Bradbury's world, technology smothers thought and numbs people into submission to their government. The power of words to embody a vision of another human being is only seen at the end of Bradbury's book, whereby people memorize books to preserve entire volumes. Transmitting information through words has been reduced to its most basic and elemental level: the supposedly high-tech world of knowledge has reduced people to functioning as if they live in an oral society, like people living in the days of Homer.

Technology transmits culture only in a mass-produced form in the novel: television, fast cars, and government-sponsored radio. Technology can be easily controlled and shaped by dangerous and hostile governmental forces, unlike a book which is open to interpretation. Workers operate like cogs in a machine in Fahrenheit 451: they too can only use technology as they have been taught to do so. Technology does not enable the workers to be more creative -- instead, technology smothers thought. Citizens drag-race cars to channel their aggression and use technology to do their duty to the state like the main protagonist, Guy Montag, a 'fireman.' Guy's job is not to put out fires, but to create them when people possess illegal books. Guy is shocked when he sees people value books, like an old woman, Mrs. Hudson, who allows herself to be burned with her books, rather than permit the firemen to confiscate them.

A society that loses its literature, Bradbury suggests, also loses its ability to question. Laws are obeyed mindlessly by the firemen, even though the values of society are upside-down. People crash cars for fun, watch people die, and there is no sense of moral stability. One of the few resistant young people, a girl named Clarisse, sums up society as follows: "People don't talk about anything…nobody says anything different from anyone else" (31). Most individuals are so drugged into believing that momentary pleasures are all that matter, they cannot feel compassion any more: "Time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles per hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the four wall televisor. Why? The televisor is 'real.' It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!" (84).

The surveillance of the society in Fahrenheit 451 is complete: Guy's boss, Captain Beatty, knows that Guy is hoarding books. He sees the books as an exhibition of a fireman's morbid curiosity about what he destroys, almost like a policeman's desire to take confiscated drugs. "Where's your common sense? None of these books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in these books never lived. Come on now!" (38). Unity in thought, as conveyed by television or the government is what matters, not debate, dissent, or even rationality. Man's intellect may have produced technology, but technology is destroying what makes us human, the capacity to think.