Introduction
Ray Bradbury wrote this book after WWII, positively shocked by the proposition that society might become totally homogenized, electronically lobotomized by television. The story is timeless, and the issues within are still with us. In fact, the dangers within the story are not as far-fetched as many assume. With the many extremist organizations which flourish under the freedom of constitutionally protected free speech, censorship begins in one small thing and then it can mushroom into institutionalized, or even nationalized, censorship.
“America’s universities and colleges have long served as forums for debate and marketplaces of ideas, often challenging students to question the status quo (Avery” Bankes et al.) Censorship is the first step towards homogenizing our society. Mass media provides the next step: mass thoughtless consumption of propaganda. We consume most of commercial television without discussion, absorbing predigested ideas aimed at selling whether products or a life style.
Main body
Ray Bradbury tells the story of the conception of Fahrenheit 451 on his website as a short interchange with a suspicious police officer when he and a friend were out walking in Los Angeles. It seems that the idea began with that chance meeting and percolated for a couple of weeks and then emerged as a scene with the little girl, Claire, and the fireman, Montag. It seems to have been caused by the less than logical suspicions of the policeman. There are certainly neighborhoods in that city which are overprotected, and where strangers out for a walk might well be questioned.
Bradbury feared the demise of reading in favor of television, and the ultimate homogenization of culture as a result of being spoon fed ideas. Media literacy teaches us that the most dangerous “sales pitches” are those which are either subliminal or are simply not filtered, because conscious attention is not paid to them. That is why sponsors still pay for ads on television even though many of us zap through them or do not listen, but do shores during commercials. These ads, whether real ads or simply suggestive sets and stories which sell us life styles, sneak past our cognitive processing and are left unexamined. Product placement takes advantage of this. (Auty, and Lewis 117)
Product placement is a paid product message aimed at influencing audiences via the planned and unobtrusive entry of a branded product into a movie or TV broadcast. (Balasubramanian, 1994, p. 29). Products are placed, named or unnamed, in a movie or television show in return for payment or other mutual benefits by the marketer (Gupta & Gould, 1997). Companies pay high fees for their products to be used in this way, because it passes the more powerful, unexamined subliminal message. (Mcarthy 1994) People process advertising and weight its validity. “For a product placement in a movie or television show, however, a consumer’s persuasion knowledge may not be activated because there is a lack of identification of the placement as a persuasion attempt. Therefore, the hidden and secondary nature of product placements may not activate the processes that typically put a consumer on guard in the case of advertising.” (Mccarty, p. 49).
“At the 1993 Media Literacy National Leadership Conference, U.S. educators could not agree on the range of appropriate goals for media education or the scope of appropriate instructional techniques, but they did identify the following concepts, based on models developed by British, Australian, and Canadian educators, that should be included in the analysis of media messages: 1. media messages are constructed; 2. media messages are produced within economic, social, political, historical and aesthetic contexts; 3. the interpretative meaning-making processes involved in message reception consist of an interaction between the reader, the text and the culture;” (Hobbs, p. 17).
What media literacy is not doing is warning of the trend toward media control of culture. The media already pushes culture in the name of marketing. Mass marketing is aiming at high profits by controlling demand. However, in attempting to control the target audience, there is an inherent danger of damaging the target. Marketers try to predict the taste and fashion trends and then get ahead of them. MTV took this to an extreme when it set up panels to predict the next big thing. Then it co-opts it and sells it to the audience which created it. Each “rebel” becomes a well paid tame pet of the establishment. It works for a while, but the teens are figuring it out and they are not happy (Rushkoff, Douglas, 2008).
Research has proven that a rich environment increases intelligence and that a barren environment can actually negatively impact intelligence. Some of the research uses anecdotal evidence, because experimenting with real children is not ethical or smart. However, the high incidence of low intelligence of children kept in barren environments lacking intellectual stimulus and human contact in some foreign orphanages was convincing. It is probable that sorting through the stimuli and making choices helps to develop new synaptic connections in the brain, keeping it alive. Mass marketing seeks to create homogenous groups for the sake of profit. However, the danger is that they seek to control the same people which they expect to control the future, keeping the companies innovative and competitive.
Brainwashing destroys creativity, and that is the real message in Farenheit 451. The power structure controls the population through propaganda, mind numbing monotony and controlled media. By eliminating books, they eliminated discussion. There just is not much to discuss when the records are gone and any type of analytical or creative writing is a crime. Dr. S.I. Hayakawa begins his book (1991) with a demonstration of how language expands our intelligence by making use of all the minds around us, by learning from written work and stimulating creative expression.
“Cowen suggests that the creation of a global marketplace in entertainment and culture poses another kind of threat: the rise of mass culture and entertainment pitched to the least common denominator–the pop globalism of’N Sync and Hollywood action films–a “dumbing down” of culture.” (Cowen) Many people fear that globalization is watering down indigenous cultures, spreading the dominant American culture and creating a homogenous market. Other argue that it actually does the opposite, fragmenting stable cultures into small pockets of imported cultures. “One inevitable casualty of such a world is the idea of a national culture as a relatively homogeneous and stable entity with its roots in a history shared by all, or at least most, of its members. Culture is always a product of history, and when histories become multiple, culture becomes unstable, impure, and hybrid; it becomes, in other words, not-national” (Fiske, p. 57).
The culture Bradbury presents in his dystopic novel is monochromatic. Any sign of difference is suspect. People have become culturally and intellectually lobotomized by enforced conformity. It smacks of the Hitler Youth of WWII, upon which this novel followed rather closely. If you keep people anesthetized with artificial self worth and praise, and train them to quote the “party line”, you can control them. In order to absorb another culture you first kill off all the poets and writers. Bradbury feared just this type of thing.
The government power used all the ammunition it had to control the population in Farenheit 451. It provided activities which presumed to absorb the participants. The vid dramas were prescripted and the participants merely played their parts without thinking. However, the visual processing accentuated the experience and the memory of it. “Stories are especially influential when we become drawn into them—when our cognitive resources, our emotions, and our mental imagery faculties are engaged. It is important that we begin to explore the full range of implications of the pervasive influence of fictional work.” (Green, Strange, & Brock, 2002)
Another tool used was the incessant propaganda and the neat phrases used to propagate it. Television “news” designed both to stimulate and raise adrenaline levels and then to calm and placate the audience. Finally, by removing all things which might stimulate independent thought, the society was subject to mass brainwashing. The damage done in China by the “Cultural Revolution” was surprisingly close to the dystopic effects in this novel. People lost their connections to art and literature and families lost their records of family history. A whole generation was robbed of it art and literature, and China suffered greatly from this (Zang, pp. 1-3).
Bradbury was not the first to worry about television and the debate over the damage of mass media to culture is still ongoing. However, while the doomsayers predicted over the years have predicted that the advent of modern technology would spell the end of literature and printed books, such has not been the case. Radio, television, video games and now computers have all been named as cultural destroyers and all were supposed to destroy our children and the education system. Instead, there are more books than ever before, and there are all kinds of digital models for distribution.
Some of the books used to support points in this essay were found as digital content. In fact, the Internet has become both a treasure trove of information and writing and a massive heap of garbage from anyone with a few lines to say, through which we sort to find what we want to read. Media literacy should probably be a requirement in school now, because information overload makes it a difficult task to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Another very scary possibility is that our youth may not be able to sort through all the messages aimed at them from every direction. We live in a world of cognitive overload. We are constantly bombarded with messages. We ignore most of them, but we remember them. That is why discussion has become so important. Discussion is the only way we have of knowing what we believe and putting it up to scrutiny. Promoting discussion is imperative if we want our youth to learn to think logically and make good connections with new information.
Let us look at the old story of the three blind men and the elephant. Each man used his own very limited perception to try to understand the elephant. However, if discussion were promoted, they could exchange information and discuss why they thought the elephant was whatever they though it was and maybe they would come up with the idea of what it really was. At the very least, discussion might promote further investigation. So none of them would be left with only misinformation and no idea that they were wrong. The knowledge that we do not know stimulates learning.
Conclusion
For a last look at the issue of the effects of homogenizing culture and eliminating debate, we should look at what learning really is. In Farenheit 451 it was the absorption and regurgitation of propaganda. It was blind obedience to authority. Our modern capitalist culture seeks to control the masses in much the same way, but their primary tool is a combination of a flood of media messages and an overproduction of mind numbing television programming and movies with more special effects than plot. Media overload submits every person to a barrage of sales pitches.
The messages are spreading via globalization. This is creating a large sector of obedient consumers, but it backfires when too many people start lining their own pockets, because the system which supports this house of cards collapses, as has happened in recent months. It is doubtful that anything like the culture in Bradbury’s novel could really happen, but there is certainly a danger that business has learned too well how to control the consumer. Fortunately, the people with active creative minds will have all the books they need, freely available at libraries and the Internet. We simply have to teach them to discuss and examine what they read.
References
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