Have you seen the news lately?
It sucks.
Today’s media landscape gives people new ways to hear only the things they want to
hear.
When confronted with ideas that challenge their beliefs, many react with outrage, censorship
– and recently, cries of “fake news.”
This trend may seem to have popped out of nowhere, but this was actually predicted a
long time ago in a book you’ve probably read: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
In case you slept through middle school English, the book depicts a dark future where ‘firemen’
have graduated from saving cats to torching books in an attempt to silence any troubling
ideas.
Fahrenheit is usually interpreted as an attack on government censorship—especially since
Bradbury wrote the book in the midst of McCarthy’s War on Communism.
But there’s actually someone else Bradbury blames for the dystopia his characters live
in: YOU!
Well not only you, but all of us.
See, in the book, the main character is informed that it was the PUBLIC that censored themselves.
It all started with the advent of mass media.
Technology advanced to such a degree that people struggled to keep up.
Information rushed in from every direction, overwhelming the population.
To quell their anxiety, people focused on smaller pieces of information.
Beatty, captain of the firefighters, describes this change – how media’s been reduced
from cumbersome novels to “the gag, the snap ending”.
“One column, two sentences, a headline!
Then mid-air, all vanishes...
Just like that, we consume and forget and consume again.
Rinse, wash, repeat.
The mind drinks less and less”
Soon, people became addicts, conditioned to feel pleasure from frivolous content.
Anything thought-provoking became downright painful.
As a result, people censored themselves from any challenging ideas.
They sought to be pacified, numbed, and validated – soundbites, factoids, and vapid drama
blaring out any troubling ideas.
Blaring out reality.
We see similar patterns with the rise of social networking and the “Feed”- News story
after news story that generates as you scroll – video after video, meme after meme directly
fed and programmed specifically to your liking—just as long as you continue scrolling.
In Fahrenheit, the media concluded that it could attract the biggest audience by ridding
itself of anything controversial, effectively ceding control of its content to outrage.
Our media-saturated society is an extension of Bradbury’s vision: with so many different
channels, streaming services and websites, media has fragmented -- each appealing to
their own individual audiences.
Fox News for Conservatives, MSNBC for liberals, and YouTube for flat-earthers.
Yet each of these media outlets must pander to their audience – which is why Fox News
can’t piss off mainstream republicans, evangelicals, and NRA members and MSNBC can’t piss off
mainstream democrats, progressives, and gun-control advocates.
The result is isolated bubbles that become harder and harder to burst.
It’s like Beatty said – offend as few as possible.
The truth is secondary to comfort.
And once someone finds their bubble, they’ll label anything that challenges their ideas
as “fake news.”
Both in the book and in real life, people protect themselves from any thing that confounds
or upsets.
They just want to continue watching and scrolling and watching and scrolling and watching and
scrolling…
So what happens next?
In Fahrenheit -- it’s here that the government steps in, encouraging everyone to stay in
the bubble and torch any stragglers - sometimes literally.
Are we destined for a similar fate?
Or will the champions of free thought save us all?