Society In Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

The start of the technological revolution was 1975. The first personal computer had just been made available to the public and about ten years later, cellular telephones started to become popular (?). A few people using a cell phone turned into a few dozen people who turned into a few hundred and by 2013, nearly seven billion cellular phones were in use around the world (?). Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel written by Ray Bradbury in the 1950s, depicted a future America where the world revolved around technology. Bradbury wrote of a society where intelligence was feared and hated, books were banned, and television controlled most everyone and anything. He was concerned that in the decades to come, the world would be changed by technology

Society today is much safer and less violent than society in Fahrenheit was. People today aren’t half as desensitized to death and crime as the characters in Bradbury’s novel either. In Fahrenheit 451, violent crimes are a normal part of everyday life. Suicide and murder are nothing out of the ordinary and no one bats an eye when something like this occurs. When the main character, Montag, comes home to find his wife, Mildred, barely breathing after a suicide attempt, he’s quite shaken up. He calls the ‘emergency hospital’ and two men are sent to his house to pump his wife’s stomach until she’s stable again. When asked why neither of them are doctors, one of the men responds, “Hell! We get these cases nine or ten times a night.” In that small town, people are so unhappy with their lives that dozens of them attempt suicide without a second thought. Violence toward others and car crashes are only slightly less of a problem in the society. Clarisse, a young girl who unlike most others understands the problems in the society, once tells Montag, “Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays? I’m afraid of children my own age. They kill each other… Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks.” In Fahrenheit, many characters cope with their unhappiness with violence and negligence. They get in their cars and speed down the highway up to a hundred miles an hour or more as the speed limit permits, hitting animals to let out their frustrations. The community even has places specifically for people to go and break windows or wreck cars. These crimes and acts of violence are completely acceptable to them. Society today is nothing like the excessively violent and unstable society in Fahrenheit 451. Today, we have many ways to prevent the criminal problems that were plaguing the community in