Brandon Marshall
4/5/15
AP English Literature
Ms.Nwadike

Writing Prompt #2 Does Television Has An Impact On Society As A Whole?

It is hard to imagine firemen starting fires instead of putting them out which is quite an irony.
Yet that is what takes place in Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451, a novel that warns readers about a future that could happen. Bradbury tried painting this picture for us, a picture that showed us a world that had technology as the ultimate leader as it kinda is today. A prime piece of technology that Bradbury mainly want to focus on mostly is, the television itself & the affect it has on us. Bradbury try to put a main focus on book burning & censorship but end up shifting attention on television and how this technology dehumanize society. Bradbury doesn't really mention much about television but seems to find book burning a much more explicit topic. As a result of Bradbury task that didn't quite fall through, he fail to express & stretch the main focus which was suppose to be television & how it was such a negative affect. To begin the expression, “right train, wrong track” relates to Bradbury & his ideas he tried to portray in the novel, which gives us less of an understanding of his clear message & ideas. In the novel Fahrenheit 451, Guy’s wife, Mildred, spends most of time focusing on the T.V screen. She often talks to the T.V as if she were in a play. Mildred wants to extend her involvement with technology and has little desire to do anything else. This is how we see that technology or
“television” to be exact is taking over books. It was as if, television was much more of an

educator then a book can be, something that we tend to believe now & days, but then again you wonder how much of this is true. Do television fully convey the message like a book does? Do you get the fully understanding & central idea like you do from a book? Bradbury fear this but how clear was it. Bradbury fear that technology indeed will override books has been accepted and actually shown. Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, with a purpose to inform people about the dangers of television entertainment. In another instance that Bradbury did was when Montag complaints about the negative impact of the TV, and even says, “Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me. I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.”. This imposes that television causes a lack of communication between the individual which is a key factor in society... Montag feels himself and his wife incapable of understanding what the book says. This quote shows that, Bradbury years ago warned about that mindless television entertainment can lessen our cognitive abilities. The author Bradbury seems to express how television affects us but its all about how far we take the idea of television & run with it. We have to put ourselves in Bradbury shoes & understand from his viewpoint on why indeed he feels as if, television will overcome books. Bradbury wanted a world that would less rely on a tv screen to provide us with such knowledge & use more of a book to extract our knowledge. A article labeled Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Misinterpreted on LA.Weekly, seems to come back and reflect on the questions that was stated.
It was stated that “Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He

says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat­panel television broadcasting the
Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen. This reflects back to do you fully gain knowledge from a tv screen as if you would a book. Bradbury basically stretch that