Fahrenheit 451: The Media

At the time of Fahrenheit 451 being written mass media was becoming massively popular and much more popular. The novel was written during the 1950s when television was becoming much more prevalent and more easily accessible to the common citizen. This along with radio was the start of the information age with information about the world becoming more and more readily available. Bradbury viewed this as being a sign that novels and books would become less popular due to people being able to get a quick short fix of information or entertainment and saw this as a coming sign that intellectualism would fall and society would become less and less focused on intelligence and more so on entertainment. Fahrenheit 451 could be interpreted as a statement against the popularity of mass media and the deminishing popularity of literature due to the coming information age. This aspect of the novel is one of the things that makes it's message so timeless and prevalent in today's modern age. Information had become even more available to us in the form of computers and laptops with the ability to access just about any kind of information in only a few clicks. The popularity of books is diminishing and the prevalence of computers seems to be dumbing down our society. I don't think that at the time Bradbury would have any idea that in 60 years the novels message would be more important or prevalent than at the time it was written, which to me is one of my favorite qualities about the books and it's message of the threat to intellectualism from the media. The fact that he could write something at the time that was so true along with 1984 by Orwell is amazing to me. The fact that both men could vividly imagine a message that would be so timeless or indeed become more important in the years to come than at the time they wrote the novels.