preview

Fahrenheit 451 Technology Essay

Good Essays

With the ubiquitous presence of technology, it would be difficult to believe that is wasn 't always around. Today, everything is incorporated with technology, from entertainment to communication, from travel to skin care, and newly, from surveillance to control. In his science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, published just as technology was beginning to make its appearance in people 's everyday lives, author Ray Bradbury describes a distant future and the omnipotence of technology in it. Ray Bradbury was an artist, with a backward vision for the future, both ecstatic, and terrified, at the sheer concept of what it may entail. He believed that man could shape its destiny, and to not conform to any boundaries, by exceeding them with scientific …show more content…

Nicholas Carr, a writer for The Atlantic, believes that “[He knows] what’s going on. For more than a decade now, [He’s] been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.”(Carr 1) Carr examines a personal experience of his technological addiction. As a writer, he finds the convenience of the web and technology to be addictive. This slowly-developing obsession with technologies does not come without a price though. The dependence on the internet made so that his “...mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once [he] was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now [he zips] along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski...The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.”(Carr 1) In the novel, this phenomenon of laziness is dramatized, in the descriptions of Guy and Mildred Montag. “he could imagine how his room would look, his wife stretched on the bed…in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios”(Bradbury 12). Mildred, like Carr, has come to rely on her technology, the seashells. She has grown to the point of dependence, at which she cannot even sleep without her technology by her side, just as Carr cannot write without the internet.

There are even more adverse ramifications that result from dependence on

Get Access