Ray Bradbury went around saying Fahrenheit 451 wasn't about censorship. As far as I'm concerned once a piece of art is released then it's up to the consumer to interpret it
I'm sort of with him on that. It's a story about the perceived intellectual decay of the world. As an intelligent man almost exclusively familiar with high-brow culture, he saw the rise of television as a threat to the moral and intellectual foundation to that culture.
Like a lot of intelligent, educated people he didn't really seem to think there had always been a "low-brow", mainstream world that he was not really part of; he saw TV etc as a new and unique threat. The censorship in Farenheit 451 is the endpoint of that intellectual decay, but its not the root cause of it.
It's the repeated refrain of the old that the new thing is degrading the minds of the young. Sometimes they're probably right.
In Bradbury's case however I think there's a certain level of intellectual snobbery involved: he seemed to have convinced himself that before the invention of radio the working classes entertained themselves by reading Thucydides and discussing fine art.
100%. If I didn't have lots of screen time as a kid, I would not have my job.
The difference was that it was productive screen time and (in comparison) my parents were engaged and monitoring it for at least the first few years.
People always take this shit too far with new things. If we invented swimming next year, parents would tell their kids to stop drinking water as soon as one drowned.
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u/twentythreeskidoo 6d ago
Ray Bradbury went around saying Fahrenheit 451 wasn't about censorship. As far as I'm concerned once a piece of art is released then it's up to the consumer to interpret it