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open_closet OP t1_iu1rvmg wrote

And the reason why they do it in the book is even more surprising.

From Wikipedia: "over the course of several decades, people began to embrace new media (in this case, film and television), sports, and an ever-quickening pace of life. Books were ruthlessly abridged or degraded to accommodate short attention spans".

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psibomber t1_iu269mz wrote

There's a scene in the book where someone uses the internet to chat in a VR chatroom... like 40 years before the internet was invented. There was a short story about a smart home.

Bradbury was an author far ahead of his time.

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TheAmbiguousRedditor t1_iu29tr9 wrote

What about the little seashells everyone wears in their ears playing music!

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Littlestan t1_iu2f08y wrote

You put those back in the bathroom where they belong!

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psibomber t1_iu2i8u2 wrote

They never explained how to use the three seashells.

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TheStrangestOfKings t1_iu2odh6 wrote

A lot of Sci Fi authors predicted the creation of the internet or smth comparable to it, tbf. I imagine it wasn’t an uncommon trope at the time

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OcotilloWells t1_iu30ro8 wrote

Someone wrote about an atomic bomb before there was one. He got a visit from the FBI during WWII. I want to say it was Issac Asimov, but I'm probably wrong.

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lordthistlewaiteofha t1_iu3sjlm wrote

Not what you're talking about, but HG Wells wrote a story about an atomic bomb in 1913, The World Set Free.

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KanoeKnight t1_iu4n43u wrote

And TVs in your house that can take up a whole wall

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GrandmaPoses t1_iu26g4i wrote

Yeah the book is more a critique of modern pop culture than anything but - proving the book’s message - the actual meaning has been buried under the more sensational and easy to digest “they burn books in the future”.

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Swellmeister t1_iu30fmk wrote

No. It's because the original message is drivel "People became too stupid to read, all cuz of TV!" Hurrdurr. What a childish reactionary story, repeated a thousand times throughout the ages without a lack of truth.

"People will selfcensor because it's easier than thinking" is actually thought provoking, and quite easily found in the book, even if Bradbury didn't intend it.

Bradbury wanted there to be one theme. That doesn't mean the book doesn't have a better, more intelligent theme in it.

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naraic42 t1_iu4jn8u wrote

>"People became too stupid to read, all cuz of TV!"

I mean, is he wrong? People used to read Dickens novels to their kids, now he's considered a slog to read. In the case study of yours truly, I used to read shitloads of books - then along came TV, games, and internet, and all the quickfire instant gratification with it. Now I can barely do a chapter of a book before losing focus. Fast paced shallow entertainment is shortening attention spans, and the ability to digest longform content.

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Swellmeister t1_iu4p88z wrote

Counterpoint. Dickens is a slog to read.

And reading is not a magical source of information or intellect. There are significantly powerful stories to be told in video games and television and people eat it up. Senua's sacrifice won goddamn awards, and thats a story that cannot exist in any print medium, and only house of leaves comes close and its still not as good. The point Bradbury is makingthat people became vacuous idiots. And there is amble proof that it's a stupid ignorant point.

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nomagneticmonopoles t1_iu4taj5 wrote

I'm not disagreeing about the value of the stories in other media, but wouldn't TikTok and the general push towards shorter videos and more digestible content be exactly the confirmation of Bradbury's hypothesis? Media is dumbed down by becoming less verbose, and in doing so, meaning is lost.

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Swellmeister t1_iu97fxk wrote

No. It's only the first half of his theme. "People will consume information in smaller bits" it still lacks the second half "and that will make them willfully stupid".

In essence they do the opposite. The drive for knowledge is a large part of what tiktok does well. People in this age have access to greater knowledge than ever before and they are taking advantage of it greater than Bradbury could have ever imagined

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naraic42 t1_iudz4cc wrote

There's much more information. I'm not sure how much more actual knowledge there is...

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Gizogin t1_iu52ccl wrote

Except that the older generations have been complaining of this for literal centuries, and it’s just kind of meaningless. New forms of media supplant old ones all the time, and it isn’t inherently a bad thing.

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SirBellwater t1_iu3dcx1 wrote

I've been reading some Bradbury short stories and he really has a theme of technology breeding complacency as a huge danger across a lot of his work

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live2rock13 t1_iu49fml wrote

THANK. YOU! The government did not wake up and just start banning things out of the blue, THE PEOPLE wanted things banned for being "Too offensive" to other people.

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Gizogin t1_iu53i7w wrote

People in Fahrenheit 451 don’t want books banned because they cause offense to others. They want books banned because they feel threatened when someone else knows more than they do. Bradbury describes the process as a growing divide between those who take the time to read a book and those who do not. The non-readers, not wanting to be left out, seek out synopses and summaries to be “in the know”. Eventually, the shortened versions take over, and then even they have their own summaries for people who find the abridged versions too time-consuming.

In the world of the novel, the people who are too caught up in the increasing pace of life to enjoy media “properly” are so threatened by those who read that they seek to ban books entirely. He is criticizing not “cancel culture” or “political correctness gone mad”, but nearly the exact opposite. Of course, in doing so, he merely repeats the same tired complaints about young people moving too quickly as generations of people have done for literal centuries.

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guynamedjames t1_iu24l7p wrote

Funny enough it's a pretty short book that doesn't require much attention span. Personally I don't think it's that great, I think the only reason it's so popular is that people who really like books find the idea of burning them so appalling that they feel the idea is worth the mediocre story.

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-BlueDream- t1_iu2k09p wrote

When fiction books became mainstream people said it’s bad for the mind and ruined the younger generations, same with TV when it came out, same with video games when they came out and now it’s social media and mobile phones. I bet in 20 years, smartphones will be fine but something like VR would be the thing politicians blame school shootings and controversy on.

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quondam47 t1_iu67jie wrote

Which is ironic because the South African book burnings ended in 1971 which was five years before the Apartheid government allowed for the introduction of broadcast television to the country.

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Gizogin t1_iu4yx0i wrote

Which is just old man Bradbury shaking his walking stick at the youth of his day, the same as every generation before him.

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