After reading Fahrenheit 451 again, I decided to do a little research on Bradbury. Prolific writer, he.

I came across an article on LA Weekly that discussed F451 and its influence on American novels. In high school, when I first read it, we were taught it was about censorship, and indeed that’s how people commonly regarded the story. Granted there are strong censorship themes present, but that’s not what Bradbury’s point was. His idea was that television would supplant the written word, and eventually supplant creativity and rational thought in general.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

Interesting. And eerily prophetic. No doubt television can greatly slash away at our ability to slow down and take in something more complex than last night’s sports scores, and books are the worst purveyors of quiet analysis and mental arousal. Montag’s wife liked the TV-walls because they were simple. No one liked things that don’t make sense (at least to them), like figures of speech and poetic language. Books would soon vanish from memory. And it’s the children - the children! - that suffer.