Monday, June 04, 2007
for ray bardbury fans: the danger of tv
Ray Bradbury recently won a Pulitzer, and while I haven’t read any of his stuff in years, I found this article interesting. He insists that "Fahrenheit 451" is not about censorship and 1950’s era McCarthyism (which is how it is taught in high school), but about the dangers of TV. Remember that in the book people are surrounded by wall to wall TV screens that provide all the information and entertainment they need without the need to ever turn pages. Oh, and if you had a hava amina of believing the TV producer who said that television actually encourages reading, well, read this.
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Very interesting. The missing link seems to be that entertainment-on- demand leads to political overcorrectness, and ultimately the end of critical thought and from thence authoritarianism and the destruction of books.
ReplyDeleteSome would argue with this contention, saying that the mass media are capable of increasing critical thought; Matt at Kankan Chadash had a post on a similar idea a few weeks ago. I suppose that the way to be machri'a the two opinions is by distinguishing between the elite, who are able to glean useful material from these media, and the unwashed masses, for whom they serve as no more than an opiate.
The question, of course, then becomes how one is capable of rising from one level to the other, so that he would be capable of deriving intellectual benefit from the maximum number of materials in the world.
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