Fahrenheit 451 Social Commentary Essay

Fahrenheit 451

In the novel “Fahrenheit 451” written by William Bradbury, we are introduced to a society which is quite different from our own; Bradbury’s novel was published in 1953, yet more than sixty years later, it remains a relevant social commentary about certain conditions in the United States.

In the novel we are shown characters who do not think deeply or care much what happens outside their own lives. Many of the character's deepest thoughts are those of what happens on television. This piece of the novel relates to the real life problems we have with teens who spend long amounts of time on their cellphones.

“A growing body of research shows that the average six to nine hours daily screen time consumed by tweens and teens is potentially

“And suddenly she was so strange he couldn't believe he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, like those other jokes people told of the gentleman, drunk, coming home late late at night, unlocking the wrong door, entering a wrong room, and bedding with a stranger and getting up early and going to work and neither of them the wiser,” (Bradbury 49). When you hear this you can almost imagine it actually happening, allowing technology to completely consume us let it consume our thoughts and memories, letting it create a barrier between you and the people you care about.

But, in the article by Josh Kenworthy, we see that technology truly is creating distance between humans. “Yet Dr. Shifrin says he has parents coming to him every day in his general practice struggling with the fact that their children “don’t come down and have dinner with the family, they don’t want to be with the family on the weekends, they don’t want go out with their friends, and their schoolwork is suffering and they don’t sleep,” (Kenworthy).

Though Fahrenheit 451 used to be seen as a fictitious dystopian novel we are starting to see that his novel is starting to become a lot less fiction, and while Bradbury’s novel was published in 1953, yet more than sixty years later, it remains a relevant social