Sure my professor
will read this and maybe some classmates but really who else will read this? Do
we live in a society in which everyone is yelling but no one can really hear?
Fahrenheit 451 is a novel written
by Ray Bradbury in 1953. The main themes of this book are censorship and
knowledge versus ignorance. A very quick summary of the plot is that a man who
works as a firemen (they burn the books) in a society where are books are not
tolerated and all literature is burned. The people in this society do not read books,
enjoy nature, spend time by themselves, think independently or have meaningful conversations.
Instead, the drive fast, watch excessive amounts of television on wall-size
sets, and listen to the radio on sets attached to their ears. This book was
written over sixty years ago but this description sounds a lot like our society
today.
Since you
were born you were probably told that reading is important. You were probably
told to go read rather than watch TV. Reading is a very important skill we acquire
early on because it is through reading that we can acquire more knowledge. I know
for me, growing up and going through school meant reading book after book for
my classes. I enjoyed reading books. It was nice to be able to hold a book and
just sit there with it. But like everything else in our world, there has been a
shift in how people read books.
With
new technology coming out, there are new ways to read books. You can read them
from your computer or from a little electronic tablet or you can be like most
people in our society and not read. The amount of reading in our society has
gone down with most adults not reading many books after they leave school. Just
because technology is advancing does not mean we should abandon reading.
Ben Agger makes some good points
in his book “Texting Toward Utopia”. He has a list of points he makes in
regards to the important changes in the reading culture. Some points include
the people read via the internet which leads to bookstores and publishers being
in decline. He says that people write
through blogging, texting, messaging and posting but many of these forms float
off into cyberspace. Another point in his list that stood out to me is that the
decline of public intellectuals is matched, and hastened, by the decline of
public readers curious about the state of the world and passionate about
changing it. Some of his points do invoke some interesting thought which I will
explore later in this blog.
The premise
of Fahrenheit 451 paints a picture of a society that is not too far from the
one we live in today. One thing the people of F-451 do is watch TV on their
oversize television sets. This book was published in 1953 so there was no way
the author would know that one day we would actually have wall-size television.
And the people of today’s society spend way too much time in front of the TV
watching Netflix or a rerun of a show they've seen a hundred times. Another similarity
between our society and the society of F-451 is one I have already pointed out
in that people do not read. Then a major similarity between the book and our
society is that people do not spend time by themselves which can lead to other
things. In our society, the cellphone is like an extra appendage for some
people constantly checking their Facebook or twitter. In this sense they are
never really alone because their phone just adds extra noise o distract the
person. This can lead to people not thinking independently. For example all the
couch activists that claim to be making a difference but do nothing except
propagate lies on social media. Or you could look at all the people who see
something they like on social media and blindly follow it like the Ice Bucket
Challenge. Social media can lead to sallow conversations without deep thought
going into any of the comments.
Agger says
that when he was growing up he did not have access to popular culture 24/7. He uses
the example of having to listen to the Giants game on the radio. He says pop
culture in his day was not inescapable like it is today but people went to
libraries and read long, slow books, both fiction and nonfiction. Agger claims
that people lead “active literary lifestyles” through emails, text messages and
tweets, which are filled with shorthand, slang, and emoticons. But my argument is
that is it really meaningful text? Agger says that a teenager’s text message of
“LOL”, “OMG”, and “HAHA” is writing but I say that it is writing only in the
loose sense of the word. This “literature” cannot be compared to great
masterpieces such as Conte of Monte
Cristo or The Jungle or The Heart of Darkness. Agger says the
kids in this post-modern world are always writing but does the writing really
equate to anything meaningful? Kids are absorbed in the social media of today’s
world but Agger says this is a good thing is a good thing because they are
still able to express themselves in a literary fashion. You have to think
though how much of it is really read? Sure many books are not popular and not
read much but I’m sure that most if not all books that are published are read
by someone. But how many tweets get sent out and just get lost on the internet?
This type of society just makes me think of F-451 in that the people in the
book had no meaningful conversations and did not act independently all because
they did not read.
I think
it is great that technology provides different means to read but people not to
take the opportunity to read a meaningful book. And after they read, they need to write something
meaning not just tweet “I just bought a coffee from Starbucks”. I disagree with Agger in that simply writing
in the form of blogs or text or twitter is literature. I feel that real literature
is meant to be read, to inspire ideas and conversations in those that read, and
from there those readers become the writer of their own literature. Simply writing
a text that says “lol you’re funny” is not literature. (As I am writing this I still
have hope in that my computer does not recognize lol as a real word.)
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