Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is deservedly known as one of the most significant, influential, and culturally important dystopias ever written in English. Set in a not-so-distant future – as viewed from 1953, when the novel was published for the first time – the book offers a grim picture of a heavily censored society. It imposes one limitation upon another on the spread or even preservation of knowledge and even creates a special organization of firemen, in which the protagonist Montag initially works, to burn books. Concerns about technological progress – in particular, film and television displacing the written word – is one of the central themes of the book. Looking from the age of the Internet, one may argue that Bradbury was wrong because technology facilitates access to knowledge instead of suppressing it. However, the author could have easily written the same novel today with only some alternations. Bradbury would have likely replaced government enforcement with private companies and stress the distracting elements of technology more, but the picture of the world where people care little about knowledge would remain largely the same.
In the world of Fahrenheit 451, the main enforcer of the dystopian social norms is the country’s government that puts measures in place to suppress printed books and the knowledge they contain. It does so to ensure a complacent and satisfied community of easily governed subjects who would not question the power of the state. Admittedly, it was not the government that originally created this new dystopian state of things. As Beatty – the book’s main exposition vehicle – mentions, the new world “didn’t come from the Government down” but happened through the simple dynamics of supply and demand (Bradbury 55). However, it is the government that ensures nothing threatens this new state of things. The government controls school education to stamp out the roots of free-thinking, and the government creates the firemen as “official censors, judges, and executors” in charge of humanity’s artificial peace of mind (Bradbury 56). Thus, while the government in Bradbury’s book did not initiate the changes described in the novel, it is the principal force in upholding them ad ensuring that things stay the way they are.
If he wrote the book today, Bradbury would have likely demonstrated this responsibility as delegated to private companies. Concern for private businesses is already a prominent feature of the government depicted in Fahrenheit 451, as evidenced by Beatty’s exchange with Montag. If a given book demonstrates the harmful effects of smoking, and “the cigarette people are weeping” because of its potential effect, the government is sure to intervene on their behalf (Bradbury 57). At the time of social media, when much – if not most – communication is done online, it would be much easier the companies to take care of themselves in this respect. Social networks would happily censor the opinions that the company perceives as harmful and delete the accounts posting them. As a result, a 21st-century Clarisse would have a hard time reaching Montag, or anyone else for that matter, because the time’s greatest mode of communication would be inaccessible to her. From this perspective, it is quite likely that Bradbury would have delegated the responsibility of upholding the status quo to the large companies themselves rather than the government as their benefactor.
One more important aspect of Bradbury’s book is that the government officially recognizes books as a threat and takes active measures to destroy them and the menace to society they presumably pose. A book is openly described as “a loaded gun in the house next door,” equal parts dangerous and unpredictable (Bradbury 56). It is the reason why the firemen exist in the first place – to destroy books pre-emptively and prevent them from sowing doubts in the blissfully peaceful minds of potential readers. The government urges its citizens to report those owning and reading books to the authorities so that Beatty and others like him would eradicate dangerous knowledge before spreading. In other words, the government forbids books directly and imposes punishments for owning and reading them.
If Bradbury wrote the book in the age of the Internet, he would have likely rejected this idea of direct censorship in favor of self-limitation of the people’s part. It is true that, in the age of the Internet, it would be nigh impossible to prevent books – and knowledge in general – from being accessible. However, it is still much more likely to encounter a person using the Internet to watch TikToks or download porn rather than search for scientific articles. Thus, if Bradbury set Fahrenheit 451 in the time of the Internet, he would have likely changed the details of his dystopia’s social arrangement while keeping the essence intact. People would disregard thought-provoking knowledge not because it is forbidden by the government but because they simply do not care and prefer to engage in basic sensual pleasures. The book already contains this premise of people living “for pleasure, for titillation” rather than intellectual development (Bradbury 56). All Bradbury would need to do to adapt it to contemporary reality was to adopt a Huxleyan rather than Orwellian approach and show that people forsake knowledge willingly rather than because of punishments.
In particular, had Bradbury written Fahrenheit 451 in the age of the Internet, he would have most likely emphasized the Web’s effects on human attention span. Admittedly, the ordinary people, as portrayed in the book, are more preoccupied with reassembling their TV walls rather than trying to “slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe” (Bradbury 58). Engaging ins pleasures – and the rather basic sensual ones at that – is definitely more important to them than meaningful contemplation. Still, even in the book’s dystopian future, people are still fully capable of concentrating for a long time on the same thing. Montag, who is just an ordinary fireman without special intellectual training, which he would not receive at school anyway, can read voraciously, which demonstrates that he can focus on a text for a long time. Moreover, he also demonstrates the ability to learn long passages from the Bible. He is not an exception –twenty-seven people are enough to remember the entire collection of works of philosopher Bertrand Russell (Bradbury 146). Whatever one thinks of the men and women of Fahrenheit 451, they have not lost their ability to focus.
It might be the case with those living in the age of the Internet, as using the Web on a daily basis seems to have a subtle but still undermining effect on one’s attention span. The Web distributes the information in an easy-to-digest way, at short passages of text and videos that are not too long. As a result, the human brain learns to perceive information in the same pattern, which makes concentrating on long passages of text increasingly hard. Admittedly, Bradbury circumvents this potential obstacle by endowing his book-remembering characters with perfect memory and a near-magic method of remembering that allows them to “recall anything that’s been read once” (144). Yet the Internet’s effects on the effective attention span would still fit perfectly within the dystopian world of Fahrenheit 451 as yet another precaution against unwanted knowledge. Once again, it would prevent people from reading long texts not because the government would punish them but because they would not be able to handle the long and attentive concentration required.
As one can see, for all the technological progress of the 21st century, Bradbury could still set his Fahrenheit 451 today, albeit with some alterations. First of all, he would have likely change the enforcement model of the knowledge-suppressing society. In the age of the Internet, when it is hard to directly limit access to information, Orwellian methods of prohibitions and punishment would not be very efficient. Instead, Bradbury would probably shift even more to the Huxleyan vision of people forsaking knowledge voluntarily in favor of sensual pleasures, especially since this topic is already very prominent in the book. Apart from that, the author would have likely changed the main enforcer of the status quo and delegated censorship to private companies owning the means of communication, such as social networks. Finally, the book would almost certainly reflect on the Internet’s adverse impact on the attention span and the negative implication it has for reading and remembering long and complex texts. These alterations would have made it entirely possible to set a dystopia that forsakes knowledge in favor of entertainment even in the age of the Internet.
Reference
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451.Columbus City Schools. n.d. Web.