It would appear that, in today’s society, what is referred to as “cancel culture” has taken over our lives. Over social media, anyone can call for people to cut off all social connections with a person, and thousands of people can see and heed that message. However, in his timeless work Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury shows the dangers of continuing down this path.
In Fahrenheit 451, in the far future, all books have become banned, and firemen are tasked with finding and destroying all literature via burning them. One such fireman is Guy Montag, who has had this job for 10 years. Soon after the beginning of the book, teenage girl Clarisse McClellan, who recently moved into Montag’s neighborhood, begins talking to him about things in the world. This makes him realize that he is sick of burning books. Some time later, Montag and other firemen are gathering books that they found in an old woman’s home to burn them. Rather than watch her books burn, she decides to set herself on fire, which shakes Montag to the core. This causes him to start rebelling, starting by collecting some of the books he is tasked with destroying.
In Fahrenheit 451, it is revealed that as other sources of information such as television and radio were gaining popularity, books were greatly shortened in order to accommodate people’s shortening attention span. This pattern of condensing information may very well be happening in the real world. While sources conflict on whether human attention spans are actually shortening, Time Magazine does state that smartphones and the attractiveness of the Internet are causing people to become distracted more often. We are already seeing content becoming more condensed, with the rise of TikTok and Youtube Shorts. It would not be surprising if we also saw this happening to books soon, in the real world.
It is also mentioned that book banning began because people started seeing them as sources of controversy and contradicting opinions. For example, in the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, which is a book 8th grade ELA teachers read to students at Ottoson Middle School, was banned because white people started seeing it as offensive. This is another pattern also appearing in the real world. According to the Associated Press, from January to August 2023, there were 695 challenges to library materials and services, whereas there were 681 in the same period in 2022. This is the highest number of complaints since the American Library Association began recording these numbers more than 20 years ago.
Fahrenheit 451 may have been published almost 70 years ago, but we can still draw important conclusions from this timeless book, ones that are very much relevant today.
