Saturday, March 24, 2012

Bradbury’s "Fahrenheit 451", a visionary insight of new media evolution



For a minute, let’s imagine you’re back in the 1950s in America, in the early days of mass culture, when new, modern consumer goods were made available for more and more people:  after the success of radio, television's popularity increased rapidly, to such an extent that at the end of the decade, 77% of American households owned a TV set. Media advertising contributed to forge - and sell- the American way of life, and conformity, entertainment, and happiness became key words of the post-war consumer society. 

Inspired (or more precisely, frightened) by these new social trends and technologic developments, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury published a dystopia entitled Fahrenheit 451, in which he delivered a pessimistic vision of where new media could lead society to. In Bradbury’s world, a deluge of trivial information and immediate entertainment has replaced culture, which has disappeared, burnt down by pyromaniac firemen (whose job is no longer to put fires out, but to burn books, which are considered dangerous for society). The main character, Montag, is one of these firemen, who becomes gradually aware of this generalized alienation and starts questioning the system: by preserving books from destruction, hiding them and memorizing their contents to give culture a new life, he engages on the path of transgression and rebellion and becomes an enemy to be chased. Look at this if you want to watch some extracts of François Truffaut's 1966 adaptation of the book ! 
                              
Even though Fahrenheit 451 was published 60 years ago (in 1953, to be precise), this vision of a not so distant future society, where mass media have taken the upper hand over knowledge and thinking, proves to have threateningly relevant aspects in today’s world of proliferate digital media. Regarding television and its evolution, Bradbury’s prediction is still striking us by its technological and psychological accuracy: while the book was written in the era of TV box sets making their first entrance into people’s daily life and providing black and white programs, Fahrenheit 451 depicts a society driven by television-addiction and self-reclusiveness. 
   
TV screens are now entire walls covering and constituting the very rooms which they are put in, creating a new, full digital experience: as epitomized by the character of Montag’s wife, who wants her husband to work more in order to afford the fourth screen-wall which is still missing in their living room, people measure their happiness by the intensity of digital reality they have access to. Difficult not to think of today’s TV screens becoming larger and larger and designed at making digital experience as vivid as possible (look at the advances in 3D technology)… In Fahrenheit 451, communication is no longer unilateral and undifferentiated (two aspects defined by media analyst Marshall McLuhan as main characteristics of mass media), and the viewer can participate directly into the TV program, contributing to create the message:
“What's on this afternoon?" he asked, tiredly.
She didn't look up from the script again. "Well, this is a play comes on the wall-to-wall circuit in ten minutes. They mailed me my part this morning. I sent in some boxtops. They write the script with one part missing. It's a new idea. The homemaker, that's me, is the missing part. When it comes time for the missing lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say the lines. Here, for instance, the man says, 'What do you think of this whole idea, Helen?' And he looks at me sitting here center stage, see? And I say, I say--" She paused and ran her finger under a line in the script. "'I think that's fine!' And then they go on with the play until he says, 'Do you agree to that, Helen?' And I say, 'I sure do!' Isn't that fun, Guy?"
Each viewer takes personally part in the show and so it is not difficult to understand that, as a result, this interactivity has completely blurred the frontier between reality and digital world. Social relations have been transformed to such a point that for Montag’s wife, the numerical projections on the screen, which she talks to and lives along with, have become her true family… conversely, she only has a superficial, dull relationship with her husband. If media were invented to connect people, here we can see a total subversion of this original goal ; here we can see the triumph of perpetual entertainment, alienating people’s minds from reality and caging them into an artificial happiness, as Montag tries to explain it to his wife:   
“Let you alone! That’s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real ?”
In the end, this vision of new media developed in the 1950s certainly continues to give us food for thought, at a time when the threat of such a dystopia coming true does not seem as improbable as it used to. Even if books are not yet in such jeopardy as in Fahrenheit 451, the multiplication of numerical books and kindle editions (more convenient to carry etc.) is not without raising questions about the future of printed books and the possible transformation of culture. Just consider all these online digests, often made for students, shortening hundred-page long books into basic summaries, and exempting you to read the whole book to have an idea about it… Ironically enough, while Bradbury has always distrusted dematerialized books and considered they would pave the way for the death of books, Fahrenheit 451 was finally released as an e-book in November, 2011 (with the author's consent) and it is now on sale from all major e-book retailers. The unstoppable march of digital media?

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