I recently reread Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel
Fahrenheit 451 and was immediately struck by the parallels to our contemporary moment. Bradbury's novel, first published in 1953, follows the personal transformation of Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to set fire to houses that contain books. Set in the not-so-distant American future, the novel depicts a society that "dreads the unfamiliar" and so bans books and makes "the word 'intellectual'" into "the swear word it deserved to be" (58). Books were not initially banned because of state censorship, but by the effects of advancements in media technology and a waning public interest in critical thinking. As the Fire Captain Beatty explains, the decline of a book reading public coincided with mass population booms, an accelerated sense of time, and the popularization of television and film.
"Picture it. Nineteenth century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your cameras. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.
