Effects Of Technology In Fahrenheit 451

Elsa Agin
English 10, Period 4
2/15 - 2/22
Be honest. How many times have you seen an addict and judged them? Whether it’s drugs, alcohol, or gambling. You judge them for being so obsessed with something they don’t need. But what if I told you, you were more similar to an addict than you think? In our modern day, our technology addiction begins to grow worse as people find themselves unable to detach themselves from a screen. In the novel, Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury and The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, the article The Outsourced Brain, by David Brooks from the New York Times, and the famous documentary, The Social Dilemma, by Jeff Orlowski, these writers depict the three harmful consequences of over-reliance on technology. It causes

As noticed in Fahrenheit 451 we can see that a lot of technology used or some of the actions of the characters are short-term fixes for long-term solutions. Such as the normality of overdosing on sleep pills because the media has normalized it and even made it okay and being able to burn houses with books because they don’t like, forgetting the people in the house are affected too. After Mildred had overdosed on her sleeping pills the previous night, Montag sees her in the morning in the TV parlor and tells her, “You took all the pills in your sleeping bottle.” to which Mildred replies, “Oh I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that in a billion years.” (Bradbury 17) This and the fact that so many people in this society overdose on sleeping pills to escape their reality goes to show that everyone else, and Mildred are looking for quicker ways to escape their society instead of fixing the world they built. This applies to real life as well because some people look to suicide when going through depression because they think it’ll be the fastest and easiest way to escape the depression and other difficulties they’re going through. When in reality, most people end up regretting it and it isn’t a real solution to a long-term problem. In Fahrenheit 451, the firemen are a good example of how technology only provides short-term solutions to long-term problems. For example, when Beatty has a suspicion that Montag had taken a book he tells him about that itch firemen get to read a book and explore what it’s like, he says, “We let the firemen keep the book for 24 hours. If it hasn’t been burned by then, we simply burn it for him.” (Bradbury 59) This quote goes to show that in their society