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Fahrenheit 451, Connection to Current Society

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Fahrenheit 451: A Model For Current Society?
The end of the Second World War sparked new cultural movements in American society. Factories which were once used to mass produce airplanes, tanks, and other machines of war were no longer needed for that purpose. Servicemen returned from overseas to find a massive amount of available jobs, wages were higher due to an economic boom, and because there were rarely any consumer goods during the war, the American people had a massive hunger to go shopping. The American Dream of having a husband or wife, “2.5 kids”, and owning a house with a white picket fence was the “Kool-Aid” that everybody in post-war America was thirsty for. What did this mean for society, though? The Dream sparked a movement …show more content…

When the radio first came out, people would turn to it to get their information from. People started to put down their books and listen to radio programs. When the television came out half a century ago, it became the primary socializer for America. It’s commonly known that shortly after its inception, 90% of American households had at least one television in their homes. This results in the television being the tool of choice for spreading messages through mass media. In modern society, television is such a norm that it’s not even something we worry about like Bradbury did in the 1950’s. The new thing is social media, such as Facebook or Twitter. Even then, it seems Bradbury foresaw these things too since it is such a predictable concept. In Fahrenheit 451, we see Captain Beatty say to Montag, “Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom!Digests-digests, digests-digests-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man 's mind about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!" (Bradbury 55). This is an example of onomatopoeia being used to express the abruptness of such information spread to the masses. It focuses on the main

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