“Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”
“We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.”
Would you believe the quotes above come from a man using his voice via a rented typewriter in the UCLA library basement during the 1950s?
He was fired up about the negative impact of the ubiquitous color television to the point where he marched down to the university library and dished out 10 cents an hour to speak his mind, hammering out a novel describing a society that surrendered its right to read, discuss intellectually, and most of all, to think deliberately and critically. He ironically used a book as the vehicle for his message, creating a dystopian society in which reading is illegal and the government controls all information. Society’s main goals are to be happy and equal.
Here are a couple of his observations that drove him to wave a warning flag about the result of technology owning us versus our owning technology:
· Families began abandoning the dinner table, sharing a meal, discussing the day’s events, and teaching children their manners. Porches sat vacant, no longer hosting small groups of neighbors sharing lemonade and discussing politics, family, and religion. Family dinner migrated to the living room where conversation died as soon as the tv began glowing. Human intellectual interaction was fading.
· The source of information began shifting away from an eclectic group: friends and neighbors with differing political affiliation and religious beliefs, history books, classic literature, news articles of real news based on fact, encyclopedias, newspapers, news anchors who simply shared the news vacant of opinion-laden, bias-laden adjectives etc.
If you haven’t already guessed, the book I’m talking about is Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. I taught this book every year, sometimes twice a year, for around two thousand years. At least it felt that way sometimes. You see, I detested Ray Bradbury’s writing style – his reckless use of metaphors, his underdeveloped characters, his confusing plots, and those bizarre elements he threw in when I was not prepared. Ray and I would NOT have been able to successfully work together on a book; one of us would have cried in frustration every day.
However, I didn’t have to work on a book with him, I simply had to support the district’s curriculum and faithfully trudge through the Fahrenheit unit. As I listened to my students complain, discuss, and try to figure out the theme of this book, my epiphany came: Mr. Bradbury and I have the same mission concerning my students. As a language arts teacher, I wanted my students to value the voice, opinion, and perspective of others, even dead white guys, women, people of all ethnicities and eras who left a bit of themselves between the covers of a book. From that space between the title page and the conclusion, we discovered others who left their ideas in the form of a painting, a song, a speech, a protest, a heroic deed, a cowardly choice, a building, a product, or an organization.
I am honored to have the ability to delve into the life and mind of other people, dead or alive, and find some mountains that beckon me to be better, to do more, and to think for myself. Technology is simply a tool I can use to discover mountains.
