8 ms·

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

by 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
What’s amazing to me is that what you just described matches how I feel about the world. We are surrounded by vapid bullshit media. When I go pump gas at the gas station, a television in the pump tells me news of Hollywood stars caught in a controversy with their lover. This happens while we bomb foreign countries in operations our government openly lies about. Those lies are then carried on all major news outlets. Information is ‘available’ but it’s like hunting for gold on the beach without a metal detector. I haven’t actually read Fahrenheit 451 but it’s striking to me how much your presentation of the ideas you present as dismissible actually strongly match my view of the world. Keep in mind, I’m someone who stopped using Facebook years ago and went vegan last year because I found the practice of enslaving animals to be cruel (and also demonstrably horrible for the environment). So I’m not one to buy mainstream ideas, but I think that’s my point here.
- base698 8y ago
  They have vegan restaurants and vegan sections in grocery stores. Pretty mainstream.
  - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
    That vegan people have places to eat doesn’t mean it’s particularly common. I’ve found it surprisingly tricky to find food regularly, and the vast majority of people don’t think about it at all. I believe across the US, Vegans represent less than 1% of the population.
Rapzid 8y ago
I will bite. The USA literally just elected a former reality television star/host as president. Without getting into questions of performance and qualifications, I think most will agree that he ran, and continues to run, a very anti-intellectual campaign and platform. It worked very well. Surprisingly well, even to his own party.
- chillwaves 8y ago
  Politics is all about psychology and making your supporters feel greater than their opponents.
xorand 8y ago
>We now have media that is so diverse, and of such specificity, that it has essentially eliminated shared culture and narrative. I find more and more difficult to retrieve old or original sources of information.
drilldrive 8y ago
It is undisputable that the totality of the information available is larger than ever before, developing and expanding at great ease. But I feel that applying a weighted average to the populace rather than considering the domain of thought that people think the same ideas more-so than ever before. Dogma is overwhelming these days, when in the past people were left to their own devices for the most part.
fwip 8y ago
Ray Bradbury gets upset when you suggest that his book about book-burning is about censorship. According to him, it's just that books are good and television(and radio) is bad. http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-true-meaning-of-fahrenheit-451.html http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-...
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  It's strange how once a book is published, it takes on a life of its own. Readers often find meanings that the authors never thought of. This probably happens in all art. Which is the correct meaning, really?
naasking 8y ago
> The main feature of the Fahrenheit 451 world is a centralized monoculture which is established through trashy tv shows, advertising, and comics. If anything, we're seeing that realised. The diversity you speak of seems shallow. Local culture, local industries are all being displaced with homogenous values that are Western, primarily American. The same is happening in the social media space.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  I don't watch TV, or follow social media. I do follow some forums that pique my interest. For me, this seems like the only way to avoid getting sucked into it. For a lot of people that would be hard to do, though.
keiferski 8y ago
It doesn’t matter how available infomation or content is - it matters if it is used.
- pram 8y ago
  It kind of does since the book is about inaccessibility, with information literally being destroyed. If the information isn't available, how would you use it in the first place?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    You don't have to resort to inaccessibility. You can just drawn in too much information, which has the same result (signal getting lost to noise, like books getting lost in fire). Sure, in this case it remains potentially retrievable, but not in any way that really matters for society at large, ie. not practically so.
beatgammit 8y ago
That's pretty much the message that I took from it. In Fahrenheit 451, the people decided to censor themselves and took pleasure in it. These days people have access to a ton of information, but choose to self-censor by engaging mostly with like-minded people forming echo chambers instead of debating differing viewpoints openly. I agree it hasn't aged particularly well, but it still is relevant. However, I think the more likely distopia is that of Brave New World where we optimize ourselves out of our humanity and instead seek pleasure and order over progress and diversity. That being said, it still has a good message, for those who are willing to look at the themes and find how they might apply to us today.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  when I read brave new world, a part of me wishes I could live there. to be transplanted there as an american adult would be pretty jarring and likely miserable, but perhaps if one grew up indoctrinated in that society, they might actually be happier. the society in brave new world also has a place for those who simply can't be happy in an idyllic, meaningless world. I'm not entirely sure what the author's intentions were, but I often wonder whether that world is actually dystopian or if it just seems that way to a 21st century westerner.
  - somewhatoff 8y ago
    It’s also worth noting that he also describes the ‘primitive’ world and it’s awful. He was encouraging balance, not a rejection of one or the other.
- chillwaves 8y ago
  "like-minded" is not necessarily a problem.
- naasking 8y ago
  > These days people have access to a ton of information, but choose to self-censor by engaging mostly with like-minded people forming echo chambers instead of debating differing viewpoints openly. To be fair, that's how the tech was designed to operate: show you things you like to generate more ad revenue.
branweb 8y ago
I agree it's more about the harmful influence of certain types of media than about censorship. An article posted on HN a while back quotes Bradbury saying this very thing (http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-true-meaning-of-fahrenheit-451.html http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-...). Maybe most people focus on the censorship angle since it was played up so much in the Truffaut film adaptation? Pretty sure I saw the film first, then read the book, and it certainly influenced my interpretation. What exactly do you mean by "decentralized information"? Like too many niches, social fragmentation, etc?
- pram 8y ago
  By decentralized, I mean in comparison to when Bradbury wrote the book. In the post-war period there were only a handful of mass media sources. In some cases there was really only one major source (BBC for example) These media organizations provided the news, music, tv shows, etc. The culture of the consuming audience was therefore far more cohesive. Access to the 'long tail' was difficult for anyone but enthusiasts. I think that environment informed the book. If you look at the centralized structure of information access back then, the society described in the book was very plausible.
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control...
almost_usual 8y ago
The book to me is more about society dictating your time, how you think, and how you should feel. Books were only one facet of control. Turn off your phone for a day without telling anyone and see how people react.
- icebraining 8y ago
  > Turn off your phone for a day without telling anyone and see how people react. From my personal experience, they react just fine. Probably wouldn't even notice. Why, how would the people who call you react?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Depends. Do you have a boss, spouse, etc?
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Sure, I've had a few bosses, who don't call me more than a few times a year, and they certainly don't complain if I don't answer outside working hours. I have friends and family who call me much more regularly, but react just fine if I get back to them one or more days later. I'm guessing a spouse would be annoyed if you just disappeared without notice for a day, but then again I doubt this wouldn't be true even before phones.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        >Sure, I've had a few bosses, who don't call me more than a few times a year, and they certainly don't complain if I don't answer outside working hours. Well, if you have a boss and (a) work in the field (as lots of people do, from sales reps and messengers to technicians) or (b) are an exec that travels to meetings, customers, etc, or (c) are responsible for a system that might fail (e.g. a sysadmin, a dev whose work is deployed, etc), you'd be expected to have the phone open all the time. And even if they call "a few times a year", they'd expect to reach someone then. >I'm guessing a spouse would be annoyed if you just disappeared without notice for a day, but then again I doubt this wouldn't be true even before phones. If there's any kind of emergency or semi-emergency (from the babysitter called in sick to the car broke down) the spouse will usually be more than annoyed if they can't find you during the day.
quake 8y ago
The attention-sucking and vapidity is independent of the media it's derived from. As long as it's 'pushed' information it doesn't matter if the information comes from a train radio or through the internet. I don't see much of a difference between the Denham's Dentriface section and the constant pinging of attention our phones (and others' phones) request from us. We have access to nearly unlimited information, but even then, I don't think most internet users are using it to exchange great works of thought or even 'surfing' as the internet was intended to be used. Instead we have these massive FAANG silos that don't offer anything less vapid than the media described in the book. Even some of the more "idea-exchange" styled websites (Reddit, Twitter) are cesspools of low-effort thought, injokes, and memes. We have too much information, and a worrying amount of it is untrue or misleading. But that's addressed by Faber in the novel as well, about the centrifuge throwing off all unnecessary thought. If there's so much media blasting in from all directions it gets hard to distinguish and the frequency of it all takes away the will to sift through fact from fiction. This is what leads to the 'fake news' aspect you mentioned. This is also addressed in the book. It's been a while since I've read it, but at one point Montag's wife stays glued to her televisor walls with Jesus himself on the screen telling her about how only his true followers buy some companie's product. Now, Montag's wife would surely have known that Jesus would not have been alive during the time of CorpCo's Wonderful Bottled Drink (or whatever it was called), but she doesn't think about it, she's too wrapped up in the overwhelming pressure applied by the media environment and believes it. It's the same when you surround yourself with this manufactured outrage stuff, and start buying into more and more outrageous 'fake news' claims because it justifies your anger, plays into your new opinions. It feels good, a positive feedback loop. It's the same.
- kortilla 8y ago
  >or even 'surfing' as the internet was intended to be used. The Internet was not intended for surfing at all. It was intended to be a network with enough reliability to withstand nuclear attacks. You’re thinking of stuff on top of it like maybe the World Wide Web (HTML links).
  - quake 8y ago
    Ok, sure. But pedantry aside, I used the word 'Internet' as OP did. At this point the Internet and WWW are synonymous.
ori_b 8y ago
> I believe the internet really upended the central premise. Have you looked at the trending videos on YouTube when you visit in incognito?
- rgoulter 8y ago
  My understanding is that GP is saying F451's dystopia is "everyone sharing the same awful reality". GP's concern about the internet is a complete lack of shared reality between people. EDIT: Although, yeah, of course "pleasure seeking & without depth" seems a good description of unhealthy social media, YouTube, etc.
  - salawat 8y ago
    I took it a bit differently actually. No one wants to put in the work to knit together a shared reality anymore. Why put in the effort when the incentives reward blatant trek and lies as much as it does telling the truth. At one point in time, we put a much greater emphasis on integrity and telling the truth. In the last century, it seems like that precedent after precedent for not telling the truth, or spinning it into a form where it's just short of a lie. Tobacco, finance, pharma, big chem, big tech, our legal system, and even our government bakes in lying by omission into the basic gameplay loop. Where's the incentive to be an honest person when the only ones who seem to be getting anywhere are the one's who lie the most? I think the Internet has just made the problem so much more visible due to the ease of spreading information. At the end of the day though, to the gatekeeper of the status of "truth" goes the spoils of the war for the minds of the people.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      > At one point in time, we put a much greater emphasis on integrity and telling the truth When was this? The Victorian era, with its literal snake oil, yellow journalism, adulterated food (e.g. chalk in bread), etc? The era when "all men were created equal", despite there being slavery? When was this era of great integrity?
      - 8y ago
cirgue 8y ago
> Social media is extremely shallow, sure, but we also have historically unprecedented access to almost unlimited information. No, we don't. We have unlimited access to text. The internet is the library of babel. You can find a community to support your view of the world, no matter how absurd or hateful that view might be.
- pram 8y ago
  How does that contradict what I said?
geggam 8y ago
So what you are saying is the intellectual minority is leveraging the tools of communication in a good way... While the rest of society heads off the cliff ? ( see : internet challenges )
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  People who use new communication technologies wrongly aren't the uneducated masses, they're often professionals and authoritarian with an agenda (see Facebook, Putin, Cambridge Analytica), or just smart profit seekers (Macedonian fake news mills)
anderspitman 8y ago
I think it's aged better than anyone could have ever imagined. It's easy to look at all the information available to those who care to spend their time with it, but what percentage of their time do you think the average person spends on the worthwhile stuff? The answer is simple, just follow the money.
coldtea 8y ago
>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. Sure sounds like 2019 to me. In fact, far more 2019 than the era when the book was written. >Social media is extremely shallow, sure, but we also have historically unprecedented access to almost unlimited information. And what we've learned is that access to information means nothing without the ability to process it. And that too much information makes things even worse drowning everything in a sea of noise. >We now have media that is so diverse, and of such specificity, that it has essentially eliminated shared culture and narrative. On the contrary, I find that we have solidified an once diverse culture to a couple of monocultures. Case in point the Top 20, which is almost all the same kind of music today.
- kortilla 8y ago
  >Sure sounds like 2019 to me. In fact, far more 2019 than the era when the book was written. You’re not living in the same world as everyone else then. Look at the two major political parties in the US alone for how we’re no longer agreeing on basic priorities for societal and economic structure.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    The 2 major parties agree on almost everything (even on hating on Trump who is nominally Republican) -- with the exception of a few token societal issues to keep their members polarized. They have never been more interchangeable.
- base698 8y ago
  Not to mention farm to table restaurants and third wave coffee. No downtown is complete with out them, and Instagram ensures all the latest trends show up every where at once.
- skybrian 8y ago
  If you're just looking at the top 20, you're never going to see the long tail and you won't be able to tell whether people are spending more or less time on the obscure stuff.
benj111 8y ago
"We now have intellectuals intentionally depriving the world of revolutionary research because of this" Any examples? I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

by pram 8y ago

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

What’s amazing to me is that what you just described matches how I feel about the world. We are surrounded by vapid bullshit media. When I go pump gas at the gas station, a television in the pump tells me news of Hollywood stars caught in a controversy with their lover. This happens while we bomb foreign countries in operations our government openly lies about. Those lies are then carried on all major news outlets. Information is ‘available’ but it’s like hunting for gold on the beach without a metal detector. I haven’t actually read Fahrenheit 451 but it’s striking to me how much your presentation of the ideas you present as dismissible actually strongly match my view of the world. Keep in mind, I’m someone who stopped using Facebook years ago and went vegan last year because I found the practice of enslaving animals to be cruel (and also demonstrably horrible for the environment). So I’m not one to buy mainstream ideas, but I think that’s my point here.

base698 8y ago
They have vegan restaurants and vegan sections in grocery stores. Pretty mainstream.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  That vegan people have places to eat doesn’t mean it’s particularly common. I’ve found it surprisingly tricky to find food regularly, and the vast majority of people don’t think about it at all. I believe across the US, Vegans represent less than 1% of the population.

Rapzid 8y ago

I will bite. The USA literally just elected a former reality television star/host as president. Without getting into questions of performance and qualifications, I think most will agree that he ran, and continues to run, a very anti-intellectual campaign and platform. It worked very well. Surprisingly well, even to his own party.

chillwaves 8y ago
Politics is all about psychology and making your supporters feel greater than their opponents.

xorand 8y ago

>We now have media that is so diverse, and of such specificity, that it has essentially eliminated shared culture and narrative. I find more and more difficult to retrieve old or original sources of information.

drilldrive 8y ago

It is undisputable that the totality of the information available is larger than ever before, developing and expanding at great ease. But I feel that applying a weighted average to the populace rather than considering the domain of thought that people think the same ideas more-so than ever before. Dogma is overwhelming these days, when in the past people were left to their own devices for the most part.

fwip 8y ago

Ray Bradbury gets upset when you suggest that his book about book-burning is about censorship. According to him, it's just that books are good and television(and radio) is bad. http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-true-meaning-of-fahrenheit-451.html http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-...

amanaplanacanal 8y ago
It's strange how once a book is published, it takes on a life of its own. Readers often find meanings that the authors never thought of. This probably happens in all art. Which is the correct meaning, really?

naasking 8y ago

> The main feature of the Fahrenheit 451 world is a centralized monoculture which is established through trashy tv shows, advertising, and comics. If anything, we're seeing that realised. The diversity you speak of seems shallow. Local culture, local industries are all being displaced with homogenous values that are Western, primarily American. The same is happening in the social media space.

amanaplanacanal 8y ago
I don't watch TV, or follow social media. I do follow some forums that pique my interest. For me, this seems like the only way to avoid getting sucked into it. For a lot of people that would be hard to do, though.

keiferski 8y ago

It doesn’t matter how available infomation or content is - it matters if it is used.

pram 8y ago
It kind of does since the book is about inaccessibility, with information literally being destroyed. If the information isn't available, how would you use it in the first place?
- coldtea 8y ago
  You don't have to resort to inaccessibility. You can just drawn in too much information, which has the same result (signal getting lost to noise, like books getting lost in fire). Sure, in this case it remains potentially retrievable, but not in any way that really matters for society at large, ie. not practically so.

beatgammit 8y ago

That's pretty much the message that I took from it. In Fahrenheit 451, the people decided to censor themselves and took pleasure in it. These days people have access to a ton of information, but choose to self-censor by engaging mostly with like-minded people forming echo chambers instead of debating differing viewpoints openly. I agree it hasn't aged particularly well, but it still is relevant. However, I think the more likely distopia is that of Brave New World where we optimize ourselves out of our humanity and instead seek pleasure and order over progress and diversity. That being said, it still has a good message, for those who are willing to look at the themes and find how they might apply to us today.

leetcrew 8y ago
when I read brave new world, a part of me wishes I could live there. to be transplanted there as an american adult would be pretty jarring and likely miserable, but perhaps if one grew up indoctrinated in that society, they might actually be happier. the society in brave new world also has a place for those who simply can't be happy in an idyllic, meaningless world. I'm not entirely sure what the author's intentions were, but I often wonder whether that world is actually dystopian or if it just seems that way to a 21st century westerner.
- somewhatoff 8y ago
  It’s also worth noting that he also describes the ‘primitive’ world and it’s awful. He was encouraging balance, not a rejection of one or the other.
chillwaves 8y ago
"like-minded" is not necessarily a problem.
naasking 8y ago
> These days people have access to a ton of information, but choose to self-censor by engaging mostly with like-minded people forming echo chambers instead of debating differing viewpoints openly. To be fair, that's how the tech was designed to operate: show you things you like to generate more ad revenue.

branweb 8y ago

I agree it's more about the harmful influence of certain types of media than about censorship. An article posted on HN a while back quotes Bradbury saying this very thing (http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-true-meaning-of-fahrenheit-451.html http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-...). Maybe most people focus on the censorship angle since it was played up so much in the Truffaut film adaptation? Pretty sure I saw the film first, then read the book, and it certainly influenced my interpretation. What exactly do you mean by "decentralized information"? Like too many niches, social fragmentation, etc?

pram 8y ago
By decentralized, I mean in comparison to when Bradbury wrote the book. In the post-war period there were only a handful of mass media sources. In some cases there was really only one major source (BBC for example) These media organizations provided the news, music, tv shows, etc. The culture of the consuming audience was therefore far more cohesive. Access to the 'long tail' was difficult for anyone but enthusiasts. I think that environment informed the book. If you look at the centralized structure of information access back then, the society described in the book was very plausible.
- torstenvl 8y ago
  https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control...

almost_usual 8y ago

The book to me is more about society dictating your time, how you think, and how you should feel. Books were only one facet of control. Turn off your phone for a day without telling anyone and see how people react.

icebraining 8y ago
> Turn off your phone for a day without telling anyone and see how people react. From my personal experience, they react just fine. Probably wouldn't even notice. Why, how would the people who call you react?
- coldtea 8y ago
  Depends. Do you have a boss, spouse, etc?
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Sure, I've had a few bosses, who don't call me more than a few times a year, and they certainly don't complain if I don't answer outside working hours. I have friends and family who call me much more regularly, but react just fine if I get back to them one or more days later. I'm guessing a spouse would be annoyed if you just disappeared without notice for a day, but then again I doubt this wouldn't be true even before phones.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Sure, I've had a few bosses, who don't call me more than a few times a year, and they certainly don't complain if I don't answer outside working hours. Well, if you have a boss and (a) work in the field (as lots of people do, from sales reps and messengers to technicians) or (b) are an exec that travels to meetings, customers, etc, or (c) are responsible for a system that might fail (e.g. a sysadmin, a dev whose work is deployed, etc), you'd be expected to have the phone open all the time. And even if they call "a few times a year", they'd expect to reach someone then. >I'm guessing a spouse would be annoyed if you just disappeared without notice for a day, but then again I doubt this wouldn't be true even before phones. If there's any kind of emergency or semi-emergency (from the babysitter called in sick to the car broke down) the spouse will usually be more than annoyed if they can't find you during the day.

quake 8y ago

The attention-sucking and vapidity is independent of the media it's derived from. As long as it's 'pushed' information it doesn't matter if the information comes from a train radio or through the internet. I don't see much of a difference between the Denham's Dentriface section and the constant pinging of attention our phones (and others' phones) request from us. We have access to nearly unlimited information, but even then, I don't think most internet users are using it to exchange great works of thought or even 'surfing' as the internet was intended to be used. Instead we have these massive FAANG silos that don't offer anything less vapid than the media described in the book. Even some of the more "idea-exchange" styled websites (Reddit, Twitter) are cesspools of low-effort thought, injokes, and memes. We have too much information, and a worrying amount of it is untrue or misleading. But that's addressed by Faber in the novel as well, about the centrifuge throwing off all unnecessary thought. If there's so much media blasting in from all directions it gets hard to distinguish and the frequency of it all takes away the will to sift through fact from fiction. This is what leads to the 'fake news' aspect you mentioned. This is also addressed in the book. It's been a while since I've read it, but at one point Montag's wife stays glued to her televisor walls with Jesus himself on the screen telling her about how only his true followers buy some companie's product. Now, Montag's wife would surely have known that Jesus would not have been alive during the time of CorpCo's Wonderful Bottled Drink (or whatever it was called), but she doesn't think about it, she's too wrapped up in the overwhelming pressure applied by the media environment and believes it. It's the same when you surround yourself with this manufactured outrage stuff, and start buying into more and more outrageous 'fake news' claims because it justifies your anger, plays into your new opinions. It feels good, a positive feedback loop. It's the same.

kortilla 8y ago
>or even 'surfing' as the internet was intended to be used. The Internet was not intended for surfing at all. It was intended to be a network with enough reliability to withstand nuclear attacks. You’re thinking of stuff on top of it like maybe the World Wide Web (HTML links).
- quake 8y ago
  Ok, sure. But pedantry aside, I used the word 'Internet' as OP did. At this point the Internet and WWW are synonymous.

ori_b 8y ago

> I believe the internet really upended the central premise. Have you looked at the trending videos on YouTube when you visit in incognito?

rgoulter 8y ago
My understanding is that GP is saying F451's dystopia is "everyone sharing the same awful reality". GP's concern about the internet is a complete lack of shared reality between people. EDIT: Although, yeah, of course "pleasure seeking & without depth" seems a good description of unhealthy social media, YouTube, etc.
- salawat 8y ago
  I took it a bit differently actually. No one wants to put in the work to knit together a shared reality anymore. Why put in the effort when the incentives reward blatant trek and lies as much as it does telling the truth. At one point in time, we put a much greater emphasis on integrity and telling the truth. In the last century, it seems like that precedent after precedent for not telling the truth, or spinning it into a form where it's just short of a lie. Tobacco, finance, pharma, big chem, big tech, our legal system, and even our government bakes in lying by omission into the basic gameplay loop. Where's the incentive to be an honest person when the only ones who seem to be getting anywhere are the one's who lie the most? I think the Internet has just made the problem so much more visible due to the ease of spreading information. At the end of the day though, to the gatekeeper of the status of "truth" goes the spoils of the war for the minds of the people.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    > At one point in time, we put a much greater emphasis on integrity and telling the truth When was this? The Victorian era, with its literal snake oil, yellow journalism, adulterated food (e.g. chalk in bread), etc? The era when "all men were created equal", despite there being slavery? When was this era of great integrity?
    - 8y ago

cirgue 8y ago

> Social media is extremely shallow, sure, but we also have historically unprecedented access to almost unlimited information. No, we don't. We have unlimited access to text. The internet is the library of babel. You can find a community to support your view of the world, no matter how absurd or hateful that view might be.

pram 8y ago
How does that contradict what I said?

geggam 8y ago

So what you are saying is the intellectual minority is leveraging the tools of communication in a good way... While the rest of society heads off the cliff ? ( see : internet challenges )

hannasanarion 8y ago
People who use new communication technologies wrongly aren't the uneducated masses, they're often professionals and authoritarian with an agenda (see Facebook, Putin, Cambridge Analytica), or just smart profit seekers (Macedonian fake news mills)

anderspitman 8y ago

I think it's aged better than anyone could have ever imagined. It's easy to look at all the information available to those who care to spend their time with it, but what percentage of their time do you think the average person spends on the worthwhile stuff? The answer is simple, just follow the money.

coldtea 8y ago

>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. Sure sounds like 2019 to me. In fact, far more 2019 than the era when the book was written. >Social media is extremely shallow, sure, but we also have historically unprecedented access to almost unlimited information. And what we've learned is that access to information means nothing without the ability to process it. And that too much information makes things even worse drowning everything in a sea of noise. >We now have media that is so diverse, and of such specificity, that it has essentially eliminated shared culture and narrative. On the contrary, I find that we have solidified an once diverse culture to a couple of monocultures. Case in point the Top 20, which is almost all the same kind of music today.

kortilla 8y ago
>Sure sounds like 2019 to me. In fact, far more 2019 than the era when the book was written. You’re not living in the same world as everyone else then. Look at the two major political parties in the US alone for how we’re no longer agreeing on basic priorities for societal and economic structure.
- coldtea 8y ago
  The 2 major parties agree on almost everything (even on hating on Trump who is nominally Republican) -- with the exception of a few token societal issues to keep their members polarized. They have never been more interchangeable.
base698 8y ago
Not to mention farm to table restaurants and third wave coffee. No downtown is complete with out them, and Instagram ensures all the latest trends show up every where at once.
skybrian 8y ago
If you're just looking at the top 20, you're never going to see the long tail and you won't be able to tell whether people are spending more or less time on the obscure stuff.

benj111 8y ago

"We now have intellectuals intentionally depriving the world of revolutionary research because of this" Any examples? I'm not sure what you're referring to here.