Technology In Fahrenheit 451

“The small crystal bottle of sleeping-tablets which earlier today had been filled with thirty capsules and which now lay uncapped and emptying the light of the tiny flame” (Bradbury 6). Guy Montag, the main protagonist, had just walked into his home to find his wife passed out and knocking on Death’s door, waiting patiently on his doorstep. Mildred, Guy’s wife, had been prescribed sleeping pills which were supposed to be taken moderately. She tried to take the easy way out of life using the sleeping pills, swallowing all thirty at once. When Bradbury wrote this novel, a lot of people were hooked on opioids because of major companies mass producing drugs like morphine or heroin (CNN). Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been affected

Hiding not so well in the book are many examples of this addiction, some being the parlor walls, which are giant television screens, the hound, and much more. When people start spending more time in front of a screen rather than other human beings, pieces of their person start to break off, becoming more and more antisocial, digging running ever deeper into the addiction. This theme is weaved within the fabric of almost every piece of dystopian literature, it was, is, and will be a social problem for years to come. In the twentieth century, when Bradbury’s book was published, technology was advancing rapidly. Not only commercial technology like cars or televisions, but also militarized technology. Each advancement was met with equal liking and disliking, some saying it would detach the users further from reality. This is still true in today’s world. Technology companies like Apple, Samsung, Sony, etc. are leading the world to become more technological. Now that shopping can be done online, it has almost totally eliminated the need to go to the store and interact with others. Humanity keeps diving deeper and deeper, but eventually it will reach a bottom where there will be a scarcity of human interaction, and everything will be done online. Dystopian literature is to thank for the knowledge of these societal problems, and with that