12 ms·

We’re Reading Fahrenheit 451 Wrong (2018)

225 points by longdefeat 8y ago

AlleyTrotter 8y ago
required reading for Professor Brody's class. Stevens Higher Institute of Technology circa 1966. I still don't understand what it had to do with fixing radios tvees and computers.
gkfasdfasdf 8y ago
FYI the audiobook version narrated by Tim Robbins is fantastic. It is more of a performance than a reading.
denart2203 8y ago
I enjoyed reading this post, thank you. The cultivation of attention and thus self care is a significant theme in the work of Bernard Stiegler, which, if you haven’t encountered it, may be of interest.
christophilus 8y ago
It’s been a while since I read 451, and I definitely remember it differently than this portrayal. It sounds to me as if it was more insightful than I gave it credit for. I’ve fallen into the pattern mentioned in the article and book: too distracted to sit down and have a long, quiet read. Part of this is due to having young kids and little high-quality spare time. But part, too, is due to addiction to distraction (such as Hacker News)!
- robin_reala 8y ago
  Go for short story compilations first and allow yourself distraction only after you’ve finished. That’ll get you back into the reading mindset.
- jerf 8y ago
  I can give you one secret, which is that despite what you hear in the press, the phone can be a double-edged sword, one that can also cut for you, instead of against you, with just a bit of discipline. Non-zero discipline, but not impossible amounts of discipline. With a book-reading app, you can get through anything, even War and Peace, in ten minutes here, ten minutes there, and maybe 40 minutes in the evening if you can scrape it together. I'm saying this not because I lack the attention span to read for three hours, because I still can... the problem is assembling those three hours when you've got a job and young kids. I've also been learning a foreign language for about an hour a day over the past year and a half, and believe me, very few of those hours have been contiguous. But I can recover five minutes here and five minutes there, and finish up in the evening, and I'm making real progress. (Unlike reading, where the attention being cut up will diminish the impact, once you're memorizing vocab and such, it's actually possible that breaking it up throughout the day is a benefit rather than the same amount of time in one block. It may help convince your brain that what you're doing is important and shouldn't be discarded, because it keeps coming up, rather than being something it can compartmentalize easily.) With a bit of creativity you can turn this to your benefit, or at the very least, somewhat to your benefit rather than merely to your continued disadvantage.
  - quicklyfrozen 8y ago
    I had pretty much stopped reading for enjoyment before smart phones. Have plowed through a bunch of books now thanks to the Kindle app. It's a combination of always being with you, remembering where you were across devices, and being able to adjust the font size to whatever's comfortable at the time. The kids getting older doesn't hurt either :-).
    - nvarsj 8y ago
      I consumed a lot of books with Audible last year when I had a commute. It's amazing how much time you can fill during those getting from A to B trips.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  I have found that I waste most of my time in the evening, when I need to "unwind" and end up watching something instead of reading or being productive in some manner. After working all day and taking care of the kids all evening, I'm mentally exhausted and prefer to have something else distract me until I'm tired enough to sleep. To counter this, I decided to wake up earlier and take my time first. I get up at 5 and then exercise, read, etc, so by the time the kids are in bed, I'm pretty much ready for sleep, and sometimes I read fiction for that last 10-30 minutes until I can't focus enough to read another page. This has made it easier for me to fall asleep and ensures I have time when I'm alert for everything I want to get done. The main downside is that my wife likes to stay up late, so I'm tired for our time together, but I find I can usually go to bed a few hours late once or twice a week and be fine, so it works out. As for things like Hacker News, I try to schedule 5 minute break throughout the day to catch up on that type of stuff. I use the pomodoro technique and catch up on stuff in the 5 and 15 minute breaks while getting a little exercise.
  - anderspitman 8y ago
    This. I've been getting up at 5 for the past few weeks. Initially I mostly wanted to be more disciplined, but I quickly realized the value in having my free hours at the beginning of the day instead of the end. Before, my energy level when programming from ~10PM-2AM would be completely dependent on how draining the day had been. The constant distractions throughout the day would also put me in a more fragmented state of mind by the evening. Now, I wake up fresh and spend my best hours reading and hacking on the things that are most important to me. I'm still trying to figure out the right balance for socializing though, since I'm usually braindead by 9PM.
rayiner 8y ago
The Denham’a Dentriface example is a pretty accurate prognostication about what would happen to the Internet. On many sites today it is impossible to think about the content what with the interposed advertising that pops up in the middle as you’re scrolling, pops out of corners, etc. Informative content is whittled down and shifted from text to low-density media like video. The Internet is a shadow of its former self. As a teenager I’d avidly read tech sites. This sort of in-depth article was common: https://www.realworldtech.com/jaguar https://www.realworldtech.com/jaguar. Gamers overran most of then. Today, you go to something like Toms Hardware and it’s advertising encrusted trash. RWT has been reduced to posting a couple of articles a year. Ars no longer has anyone who knows how a computer or operating system works, though at least its ads aren’t the worst.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  It feels like I forgot to renew to the internet so I'm stuck with the demo version. As you said, it's just so light on content and heavy on ads in places.
  - geitir 8y ago
    I would say this has a lot to do with the increase in accessibility and subsequent marketization reducing what used to be a fairly niche service attenuated to like minded scientific or at least exploratorily minded people to a common denominator that maximizes profits
Fnoord 8y ago
(2018) June 15, 2018.
- sctb 8y ago
  Thanks! Updated.
pram 8y ago
I think the anti-intellectual theme of Fahrenheit 451 is pretty clear. The story spends a lot of time describing the vapid media that everyone consumes. I don’t see how anyone could interpret it to be solely about censorship if they actually read the book, to be honest. In my very humble opinion, I don't think the book has aged well. I believe the internet really upended the central premise. The book described society devolving into an illiterate, pleasure-seeking dystopia. The main feature of the Fahrenheit 451 world is a centralized monoculture which is established through trashy tv shows, advertising, and comics. Social media is extremely shallow, sure, but we also have historically unprecedented access to almost unlimited information. We now have media that is so diverse, and of such specificity, that it has essentially eliminated shared culture and narrative. It seems the path to the 21st century dystopia is having too much radically decentralized information, rather than a lack of it. Now the concern isn't people being deprived of information. To the contrary, the concern now is people consuming the 'wrong' or 'fake' information. We now have intellectuals intentionally depriving the world of revolutionary research because of this.
- numberbleach 8y ago
  lol DOWNVOTED for this? well, fuck you to. I hate it when people pick out random quotes from a comment and then argue them. It's like those people just want to argue and pick out snippets to argue with. It's so annoying. But here we go: > The main feature of the Fahrenheit 451 world is a centralized monoculture which is established through trashy tv shows, advertising, and comics. That is the world we live in, isn't it? > Social media is extremely shallow, sure, but we also have historically unprecedented access to almost unlimited information. This I actually don't know. In theory we do or we ...could. But do we actually have access to all the worlds information? For one, Google and Bing heavily filter search results. It's not hard to find a dark search. Plus a lot of the information is technically there but it's disparate and poorly presented. Really you still need a book for a lot of things.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
almost_usual 8y ago
I read Fahrenheit 451 again a month ago and it was much more relatable than the first time I read it. The pattern of going from point A to B and being told to do that by someone or something as quickly as possible is the norm. If you have a demanding job and a family at the end of most days it’s easy to tune out and only have the desire to feel comfortable. You’ve been exhausting yourself to be ‘accepted’ by society. Thinking for yourself and finding moments to do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted was dangerous in Fahrenheit 451. I think that is becoming very real nowadays. If you told someone you went for a walk aimlessly in a park and stared at flowers for 20 minutes with your phone turned off you could be viewed as a social deviant to some degree. Your wife or girlfriend might be upset because they couldn’t get ahold of you. A friend or coworker might be frustrated because they needed to tell you something that “couldn’t wait”. That’s where the danger lies. Society dictating how you think and how you should feel all the time. Technology is only a tool that makes it more efficient. During the Summer of Love thousands of people just up and left their lives to spend a summer doing whatever they wanted. The only way they could be reached was by telephone or letter and that was if they wanted to be contacted. I honesty don’t think a movement like that or an era like the 60s is possible anymore. People are too attached to their phones and what society expects out of them.
- geitir 8y ago
  I believe this has a lot to do with the reduction of the middle class. The amount of people who can afford to go even two months with no form of income in the United States is extremely low
- openfuture 8y ago
  Rainbow gatherings are something you may be interested in attending..
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Sure, but avoid ones held too near cities. There are too many violent drunks.
- capedape 8y ago
kijin 8y ago
That's exactly what Ray Bradbury himself said. He was responding to the invention of television and the addiction to shallow entertainment he believed it would bring to the society. We don't always need to interpret literature in accordance with the author's original intentions, but it helps to acknowledge and remember them. Having said that, though, I'd like to ask why Bradbury bothered to include a powerful image of censorship (burning of books) in the story if that was't what he intended to focus on. It would seem that a population addicted to shallow entertainment won't even need firemen to burn their books; they'll just let the dead trees rot in a basement somewhere. Perhaps censorship was needed because there's always a small number of people who find books interesting. Who are attracted to deep thinking. Who will develop and harbor subversive ideologies as a result, and who can incite a revolution when the conditions are ripe. As long as these people exist, the powers that be have a reason to fear. As long as some of us are reading books, there's hope. Or at least that's what I think Bradbury was trying to say, especially at the end.
- gshubert17 8y ago
  Yes. Bradbury himself here in an article from 2007: https://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125 https://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mi...
- anderspitman 8y ago
  Or maybe the general principle that if you make the wrong choices often enough, eventually you might find you've lost the opportunity to choose at all.
tlholaday 8y ago
Wrongly.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  Actually "wrong" seems OK here, according to the first and only page I consulted: "...wrong can also be an adverb. There’s nothing in the least new about this — the Oxford English Dictionary has examples from the thirteenth century onwards. Robert Burchfield noted in his 1996 revision of Fowler’s Modern English Usage that “The subtleties attending the various uses are considerable”, pointing out that the OED devotes five times as much space to adverbial wrong as it does to the notionally correct wrongly. The quick and easy rule is that wrongly appears before the verb being modified (“the earlier case was wrongly decided”) and wrong after the verb (“he answered the question wrong”). Like most such rules, it’s not even half the story. Style guides and grammars for learners try to give more complete guidance, variously stating that, if the situation is formal, wrongly may be the better choice in either position; if the adverb comes before the verb, wrongly is the only possible form; if the verb is a common short one, such as do, get, have or go, it often forms a set phrase in which wrong is the idiomatic choice (“don’t get me wrong”, “she did him wrong”, “how did he go wrong?”); wrong is preferred after the verb when the intended meaning is “in an unsuitable or undesirable manner or direction” or “incorrect” (as in spelling something incorrectly); if it means “falsely”, then wrongly is the correct form (“rightly or wrongly”, “the award was denied him wrongly”, “he was incapable of acting wrongly”..." http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-wro2.htm http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-wro2.htm So..maybe your objection stems from the over-informal feel of adverb "wrong" in a headline.
branweb 8y ago
Previous discussion of a similar (and IMO better) article on the book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14992956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14992956 . The article under discussing there includes lots of quotes from Bradbury himself.
geitir 8y ago
Can't take this article seriously with the amount of typos
mizzao 8y ago
Our attention is a valuable resource that we too easily give away for free. Social media (and in the past, television) are the junk food of information.
anonu 8y ago
> Bogost examined Airpods’ potential long term social consequences. “Human focus, already ambiguously cleft between world and screen,” he suggests, “will become split again, even when maintaining eye contact.” A little further on, he writes, “Everyone will exist in an ambiguous state between public engagement with a room or space and private retreat into devices or media.” I do think the Airpods are pretty revolutionary. For starters - Apple built a custom chip for them. There are very few companies that have the resources to do such a thing. As a result, even though they are imperfect, they are still far and away a pretty revolutionary technology. It is interesting to look at the social consequences of the Airpods. For starters, they are expensive, so in some sense they are a status symbol, especially for the younger generation. The Atlantic Article the author mentions is interesting though - the thought that a technology melds so well into our daily lives and workflow that it creates a further social rift is scary.
trimbo 8y ago
The Airpods article is interesting. Airpods seem to be changing the office as well. People are doing their entire routine at the office with Airpods: going to the coffee maker, to the cafeteria, to the bathroom, going to meetings (then taking them out there, I hope!). I'm not sure the people who do it want to portray the image of "don't you dare talk to me", but that's how I interpret it. If no one can talk to anyone without deliberate interruption, it seems like we'd lose workplace camaraderie.
- 1123581321 8y ago
  I agree. I don’t walk around with mine during standard hours. I usually also only wear the one that people can’t see when they come into my hours, and I apologize if someone says something to me while I have them in. I think it’s very important to appear accessible and to hear and participate in serendipitous conversation.
matchagaucho 8y ago
Reading this reminds me how my High School Teacher prodded a cold-war, Orwellian, censorship interpretation out of us in exams. But Bradbury was definitely on to something deeper. I'd forgotten all about the Seashells and 4 walled televisor in this classic novel. Definitely a great metaphor for today's social media.
zackmorris 8y ago
As I've gotten older, I've started noticing that culture goes through endless time loops like we're riding a toy train. Back in the 90s, we listened to disco and wore bell bottoms just like our parents did. Today, I see teenagers wearing overalls and boots and listening to Nirvana (which is quite heartwarming, honestly - at least there is hope for the future). I'm going to go out on a limb and say that social media is just another cultural deviation. As a society, we haven't said yet that it's rude to talk loudly into your cell phone in public, or stare into it when you're surrounded by people also staring into it, or wear headphones everywhere like the gym where you might learn something if you ever talked to anyone. It's an eerie feeling to see the world a step or two back, to take in the big picture when everyone else is jacked in. I can't really blame people for putting on blinders, as bleak as these times are. Sure, we have unlimited access to news and information. But news is mostly bad, because that's where the money is. Even the best news like NPR leads to depression, especially when you realize that the main news networks broadcast spin now instead of investigative journalism, and they're all anyone watches. I have no deep epiphany here. But I just want everyone to know that this profound cultural cynicism we're experiencing right now is quite familiar to me, because it's what I grew up with in the 80s and 90s while most of the world was distracted with Monday Night Football. The world's been burning that entire time, most people actively tune it out, and the people like us who see through the veil see more than ever.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  >Today, I see teenagers wearing overalls and boots and listening to Nirvana (which is quite heartwarming, honestly - at least there is hope for the future). I'm puzzled what in that is at all heart-warming? Or hope-giving? edit: They're genuinely curious, non-rhetorical questions!
  - astura 8y ago
    The person that you are replying to presumably grew up with overalls and Nirvana.
    - zackmorris 8y ago

225 points by longdefeat 8y ago

required reading for Professor Brody's class. Stevens Higher Institute of Technology circa 1966. I still don't understand what it had to do with fixing radios tvees and computers.

gkfasdfasdf 8y ago

FYI the audiobook version narrated by Tim Robbins is fantastic. It is more of a performance than a reading.

denart2203 8y ago

I enjoyed reading this post, thank you. The cultivation of attention and thus self care is a significant theme in the work of Bernard Stiegler, which, if you haven’t encountered it, may be of interest.

christophilus 8y ago

It’s been a while since I read 451, and I definitely remember it differently than this portrayal. It sounds to me as if it was more insightful than I gave it credit for. I’ve fallen into the pattern mentioned in the article and book: too distracted to sit down and have a long, quiet read. Part of this is due to having young kids and little high-quality spare time. But part, too, is due to addiction to distraction (such as Hacker News)!

robin_reala 8y ago
Go for short story compilations first and allow yourself distraction only after you’ve finished. That’ll get you back into the reading mindset.
jerf 8y ago
I can give you one secret, which is that despite what you hear in the press, the phone can be a double-edged sword, one that can also cut for you, instead of against you, with just a bit of discipline. Non-zero discipline, but not impossible amounts of discipline. With a book-reading app, you can get through anything, even War and Peace, in ten minutes here, ten minutes there, and maybe 40 minutes in the evening if you can scrape it together. I'm saying this not because I lack the attention span to read for three hours, because I still can... the problem is assembling those three hours when you've got a job and young kids. I've also been learning a foreign language for about an hour a day over the past year and a half, and believe me, very few of those hours have been contiguous. But I can recover five minutes here and five minutes there, and finish up in the evening, and I'm making real progress. (Unlike reading, where the attention being cut up will diminish the impact, once you're memorizing vocab and such, it's actually possible that breaking it up throughout the day is a benefit rather than the same amount of time in one block. It may help convince your brain that what you're doing is important and shouldn't be discarded, because it keeps coming up, rather than being something it can compartmentalize easily.) With a bit of creativity you can turn this to your benefit, or at the very least, somewhat to your benefit rather than merely to your continued disadvantage.
- quicklyfrozen 8y ago
  I had pretty much stopped reading for enjoyment before smart phones. Have plowed through a bunch of books now thanks to the Kindle app. It's a combination of always being with you, remembering where you were across devices, and being able to adjust the font size to whatever's comfortable at the time. The kids getting older doesn't hurt either :-).
  - nvarsj 8y ago
    I consumed a lot of books with Audible last year when I had a commute. It's amazing how much time you can fill during those getting from A to B trips.
beatgammit 8y ago
I have found that I waste most of my time in the evening, when I need to "unwind" and end up watching something instead of reading or being productive in some manner. After working all day and taking care of the kids all evening, I'm mentally exhausted and prefer to have something else distract me until I'm tired enough to sleep. To counter this, I decided to wake up earlier and take my time first. I get up at 5 and then exercise, read, etc, so by the time the kids are in bed, I'm pretty much ready for sleep, and sometimes I read fiction for that last 10-30 minutes until I can't focus enough to read another page. This has made it easier for me to fall asleep and ensures I have time when I'm alert for everything I want to get done. The main downside is that my wife likes to stay up late, so I'm tired for our time together, but I find I can usually go to bed a few hours late once or twice a week and be fine, so it works out. As for things like Hacker News, I try to schedule 5 minute break throughout the day to catch up on that type of stuff. I use the pomodoro technique and catch up on stuff in the 5 and 15 minute breaks while getting a little exercise.
- anderspitman 8y ago
  This. I've been getting up at 5 for the past few weeks. Initially I mostly wanted to be more disciplined, but I quickly realized the value in having my free hours at the beginning of the day instead of the end. Before, my energy level when programming from ~10PM-2AM would be completely dependent on how draining the day had been. The constant distractions throughout the day would also put me in a more fragmented state of mind by the evening. Now, I wake up fresh and spend my best hours reading and hacking on the things that are most important to me. I'm still trying to figure out the right balance for socializing though, since I'm usually braindead by 9PM.

rayiner 8y ago

The Denham’a Dentriface example is a pretty accurate prognostication about what would happen to the Internet. On many sites today it is impossible to think about the content what with the interposed advertising that pops up in the middle as you’re scrolling, pops out of corners, etc. Informative content is whittled down and shifted from text to low-density media like video. The Internet is a shadow of its former self. As a teenager I’d avidly read tech sites. This sort of in-depth article was common: https://www.realworldtech.com/jaguar https://www.realworldtech.com/jaguar. Gamers overran most of then. Today, you go to something like Toms Hardware and it’s advertising encrusted trash. RWT has been reduced to posting a couple of articles a year. Ars no longer has anyone who knows how a computer or operating system works, though at least its ads aren’t the worst.

Waterluvian 8y ago
It feels like I forgot to renew to the internet so I'm stuck with the demo version. As you said, it's just so light on content and heavy on ads in places.
- geitir 8y ago
  I would say this has a lot to do with the increase in accessibility and subsequent marketization reducing what used to be a fairly niche service attenuated to like minded scientific or at least exploratorily minded people to a common denominator that maximizes profits

Fnoord 8y ago

(2018) June 15, 2018.

sctb 8y ago
Thanks! Updated.

pram 8y ago

I think the anti-intellectual theme of Fahrenheit 451 is pretty clear. The story spends a lot of time describing the vapid media that everyone consumes. I don’t see how anyone could interpret it to be solely about censorship if they actually read the book, to be honest. In my very humble opinion, I don't think the book has aged well. I believe the internet really upended the central premise. The book described society devolving into an illiterate, pleasure-seeking dystopia. The main feature of the Fahrenheit 451 world is a centralized monoculture which is established through trashy tv shows, advertising, and comics. Social media is extremely shallow, sure, but we also have historically unprecedented access to almost unlimited information. We now have media that is so diverse, and of such specificity, that it has essentially eliminated shared culture and narrative. It seems the path to the 21st century dystopia is having too much radically decentralized information, rather than a lack of it. Now the concern isn't people being deprived of information. To the contrary, the concern now is people consuming the 'wrong' or 'fake' information. We now have intellectuals intentionally depriving the world of revolutionary research because of this.

numberbleach 8y ago
lol DOWNVOTED for this? well, fuck you to. I hate it when people pick out random quotes from a comment and then argue them. It's like those people just want to argue and pick out snippets to argue with. It's so annoying. But here we go: > The main feature of the Fahrenheit 451 world is a centralized monoculture which is established through trashy tv shows, advertising, and comics. That is the world we live in, isn't it? > Social media is extremely shallow, sure, but we also have historically unprecedented access to almost unlimited information. This I actually don't know. In theory we do or we ...could. But do we actually have access to all the worlds information? For one, Google and Bing heavily filter search results. It's not hard to find a dark search. Plus a lot of the information is technically there but it's disparate and poorly presented. Really you still need a book for a lot of things.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
TaylorAlexander 8y ago

almost_usual 8y ago

I read Fahrenheit 451 again a month ago and it was much more relatable than the first time I read it. The pattern of going from point A to B and being told to do that by someone or something as quickly as possible is the norm. If you have a demanding job and a family at the end of most days it’s easy to tune out and only have the desire to feel comfortable. You’ve been exhausting yourself to be ‘accepted’ by society. Thinking for yourself and finding moments to do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted was dangerous in Fahrenheit 451. I think that is becoming very real nowadays. If you told someone you went for a walk aimlessly in a park and stared at flowers for 20 minutes with your phone turned off you could be viewed as a social deviant to some degree. Your wife or girlfriend might be upset because they couldn’t get ahold of you. A friend or coworker might be frustrated because they needed to tell you something that “couldn’t wait”. That’s where the danger lies. Society dictating how you think and how you should feel all the time. Technology is only a tool that makes it more efficient. During the Summer of Love thousands of people just up and left their lives to spend a summer doing whatever they wanted. The only way they could be reached was by telephone or letter and that was if they wanted to be contacted. I honesty don’t think a movement like that or an era like the 60s is possible anymore. People are too attached to their phones and what society expects out of them.

geitir 8y ago
I believe this has a lot to do with the reduction of the middle class. The amount of people who can afford to go even two months with no form of income in the United States is extremely low
openfuture 8y ago
Rainbow gatherings are something you may be interested in attending..
- mirimir 8y ago
  Sure, but avoid ones held too near cities. There are too many violent drunks.
capedape 8y ago

kijin 8y ago

That's exactly what Ray Bradbury himself said. He was responding to the invention of television and the addiction to shallow entertainment he believed it would bring to the society. We don't always need to interpret literature in accordance with the author's original intentions, but it helps to acknowledge and remember them. Having said that, though, I'd like to ask why Bradbury bothered to include a powerful image of censorship (burning of books) in the story if that was't what he intended to focus on. It would seem that a population addicted to shallow entertainment won't even need firemen to burn their books; they'll just let the dead trees rot in a basement somewhere. Perhaps censorship was needed because there's always a small number of people who find books interesting. Who are attracted to deep thinking. Who will develop and harbor subversive ideologies as a result, and who can incite a revolution when the conditions are ripe. As long as these people exist, the powers that be have a reason to fear. As long as some of us are reading books, there's hope. Or at least that's what I think Bradbury was trying to say, especially at the end.

gshubert17 8y ago
Yes. Bradbury himself here in an article from 2007: https://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125 https://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mi...
anderspitman 8y ago
Or maybe the general principle that if you make the wrong choices often enough, eventually you might find you've lost the opportunity to choose at all.

tlholaday 8y ago

Wrongly.

yesenadam 8y ago
Actually "wrong" seems OK here, according to the first and only page I consulted: "...wrong can also be an adverb. There’s nothing in the least new about this — the Oxford English Dictionary has examples from the thirteenth century onwards. Robert Burchfield noted in his 1996 revision of Fowler’s Modern English Usage that “The subtleties attending the various uses are considerable”, pointing out that the OED devotes five times as much space to adverbial wrong as it does to the notionally correct wrongly. The quick and easy rule is that wrongly appears before the verb being modified (“the earlier case was wrongly decided”) and wrong after the verb (“he answered the question wrong”). Like most such rules, it’s not even half the story. Style guides and grammars for learners try to give more complete guidance, variously stating that, if the situation is formal, wrongly may be the better choice in either position; if the adverb comes before the verb, wrongly is the only possible form; if the verb is a common short one, such as do, get, have or go, it often forms a set phrase in which wrong is the idiomatic choice (“don’t get me wrong”, “she did him wrong”, “how did he go wrong?”); wrong is preferred after the verb when the intended meaning is “in an unsuitable or undesirable manner or direction” or “incorrect” (as in spelling something incorrectly); if it means “falsely”, then wrongly is the correct form (“rightly or wrongly”, “the award was denied him wrongly”, “he was incapable of acting wrongly”..." http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-wro2.htm http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-wro2.htm So..maybe your objection stems from the over-informal feel of adverb "wrong" in a headline.

branweb 8y ago

Previous discussion of a similar (and IMO better) article on the book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14992956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14992956 . The article under discussing there includes lots of quotes from Bradbury himself.

geitir 8y ago

Can't take this article seriously with the amount of typos

mizzao 8y ago

Our attention is a valuable resource that we too easily give away for free. Social media (and in the past, television) are the junk food of information.

anonu 8y ago

> Bogost examined Airpods’ potential long term social consequences. “Human focus, already ambiguously cleft between world and screen,” he suggests, “will become split again, even when maintaining eye contact.” A little further on, he writes, “Everyone will exist in an ambiguous state between public engagement with a room or space and private retreat into devices or media.” I do think the Airpods are pretty revolutionary. For starters - Apple built a custom chip for them. There are very few companies that have the resources to do such a thing. As a result, even though they are imperfect, they are still far and away a pretty revolutionary technology. It is interesting to look at the social consequences of the Airpods. For starters, they are expensive, so in some sense they are a status symbol, especially for the younger generation. The Atlantic Article the author mentions is interesting though - the thought that a technology melds so well into our daily lives and workflow that it creates a further social rift is scary.

trimbo 8y ago

The Airpods article is interesting. Airpods seem to be changing the office as well. People are doing their entire routine at the office with Airpods: going to the coffee maker, to the cafeteria, to the bathroom, going to meetings (then taking them out there, I hope!). I'm not sure the people who do it want to portray the image of "don't you dare talk to me", but that's how I interpret it. If no one can talk to anyone without deliberate interruption, it seems like we'd lose workplace camaraderie.

1123581321 8y ago
I agree. I don’t walk around with mine during standard hours. I usually also only wear the one that people can’t see when they come into my hours, and I apologize if someone says something to me while I have them in. I think it’s very important to appear accessible and to hear and participate in serendipitous conversation.

matchagaucho 8y ago

Reading this reminds me how my High School Teacher prodded a cold-war, Orwellian, censorship interpretation out of us in exams. But Bradbury was definitely on to something deeper. I'd forgotten all about the Seashells and 4 walled televisor in this classic novel. Definitely a great metaphor for today's social media.

zackmorris 8y ago

As I've gotten older, I've started noticing that culture goes through endless time loops like we're riding a toy train. Back in the 90s, we listened to disco and wore bell bottoms just like our parents did. Today, I see teenagers wearing overalls and boots and listening to Nirvana (which is quite heartwarming, honestly - at least there is hope for the future). I'm going to go out on a limb and say that social media is just another cultural deviation. As a society, we haven't said yet that it's rude to talk loudly into your cell phone in public, or stare into it when you're surrounded by people also staring into it, or wear headphones everywhere like the gym where you might learn something if you ever talked to anyone. It's an eerie feeling to see the world a step or two back, to take in the big picture when everyone else is jacked in. I can't really blame people for putting on blinders, as bleak as these times are. Sure, we have unlimited access to news and information. But news is mostly bad, because that's where the money is. Even the best news like NPR leads to depression, especially when you realize that the main news networks broadcast spin now instead of investigative journalism, and they're all anyone watches. I have no deep epiphany here. But I just want everyone to know that this profound cultural cynicism we're experiencing right now is quite familiar to me, because it's what I grew up with in the 80s and 90s while most of the world was distracted with Monday Night Football. The world's been burning that entire time, most people actively tune it out, and the people like us who see through the veil see more than ever.

yesenadam 8y ago
>Today, I see teenagers wearing overalls and boots and listening to Nirvana (which is quite heartwarming, honestly - at least there is hope for the future). I'm puzzled what in that is at all heart-warming? Or hope-giving? edit: They're genuinely curious, non-rhetorical questions!
- astura 8y ago
  The person that you are replying to presumably grew up with overalls and Nirvana.
  - zackmorris 8y ago