Something I always found remarkable about Fahrenheit 451 is how it explicitly says the book-burning situation didn't come about due to a dictatorship or similar, but "bottom-up" because the people lost interest in books. Here's a quote:
"It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God."
According to Wikipedia it seems Ray Bradbury changed his mind, or at least the way he explained his inspiration for the book several times over the years.
I have no idea about the political climate of the 1950s, but it wasn't long after WWII, Nazis and everything, so that seems like it might have been a prime motivation.
These days of course, the mentions of technology and media consumption habits seem far more relatable:
“Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”
It's like he foresaw Tik-Tok!
As a 2020s person I find it mind-boggling to think about someone from the 1950s being concerned with "condensations and digests".
I mean, color TV only just became commonplace in 1953. Wow.
In Fahrenheit 451, comics are mentioned like some sort of abberation. Well, Bradbury is talking about 1950s comics, but the medium has developed since then and comics aren't just 4 panel strips.
Video games weren't around, but I can see how people from the 80s would be concerned with kids playing Space Invaders all day. But games have undergone a development in the opposite direction, to taking a good deal of investment (both with respect to time as well as emotionally and I'd say also intellectually)
In acoustics there's a phenomenon called the "shepard tone", which consists of several rising notes overlaid over each other and fading in and out to give the impression of a continually rising note.
I guess what I want to say is, by all means we should be vigilant about how we use our media, but perhaps part of our impression of how media is changing or worsening is like a shepard tone? After all we're still here having mostly civilized and dare I say it profound discussions, even though we're not writing paper letters or publishing in journals, but using the horrible "social media", offshoots of a service that at it's launch allowed posts of at most 140 characters in length.
#fahrenheit451 #socialmedia #enshittification
