Dominique Arcieri
10/29/14
American Lit
Period 4/5
Fahrenheit 451 vs. Today’s Society Fahrenheit 451 is a lot like our society today. People don’t value the true important things in life. Their minds became attached to the trends and popular ideas within the media. The novel almost attempts to warn readers of what society would be like if the media took over our minds. In today’s society, many people focus on the trending idea. Bradbury aims to prevent the future in our contemporary world by portraying the overuse of technology, censorship in the media, and how family values have changed. Mildred takes the use of technology to an extreme level. “And in her ears the little seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in,….(16). “His wife in the TV parlor paused long enough from reading from reading her script to glance up.” (23) In this dystopian society, there are so many things going on such as book burning and war. Mildred doesn’t pay attention to what’s going on around her because whenever we hear about her she’s listening to her seashells or watching the parlor walls. She is so into technology that she doesn’t care about anything else. She constantly spends her time using these things rather than doing anything truly productive. In today’s society we can relate to Mildred’s obsession with technology. People today are constantly listening to music similar to seashells and watching TV and their favorite shows like the parlor walls. Everyone is so worried about following the status quo rather than what’s really important like war and nationwide events. It shows how Bradbury tried to warn us about the overuse of technology so that maybe we would see how it affects Mildred and try and prevent ourselves from being like her with technology in our own society. Like the overuse of technology, censorship was also used to predict today’s society. “’They’re faking. You threw them off at the river. They can’t admit it. They know they can hold their audience only so long. The show’s got to have a snap ending, quick! If they started searching the whole damn river it might take all night. So they’re sniffing for a scapegoat to end things with a bang. Watch. They’ll catch Montag in the next five minutes” (150) The news didn’t want the people of the dystopian society to know that Montag, “the crazy guy”, was still out there somewhere. They didn’t care if he was crazy or if what he did was bad. They just wanted the people to believe they caught him even though they couldn’t find him. They filmed a random guy getting caught and played it off as if it was Montag so that there wasn’t a crazy man running around their world anymore. Today, the news doesn’t always include everything they know on stories. They also don’t always tell us when things are going on right away. For example, they never said anything about Isis until it became a big deal. Anything could have happened with that in that period of time that they kept it from us. This shows that Bradbury tried to warn us about censorship in our society and what the people will and will not hide from us. Family isn’t seen as an important