Professional Issues for Interactive Media

Book Critique PresentationKayleigh Smith: 11042559

18th April 2012

Title: Fahrenheit 451 Written by: Ray BradburyPublisher: Ballantine Books Date of Publication: 1953

Areas of Discussion

• About the Author• Plot Summary• Issues raised in the book

– Censorship– Knowledge vs Ignorance– The influence of technology– Utilitarianism approach to society

• Conclusion • Questions

Ray Douglas Bradbury• born : USA, 1920.• celebrated among American writers of speculative fiction.• He has published more than thirty books• close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, and plays • He was a "student of life”• Most recognised following the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950• 1,000 school curriculum "recommended reading" anthologies.

Awards• O. Henry Memorial Award• Benjamin Franklin Award• The World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement • The Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America• The PEN Center USA West Lifetime Achievement Award• He received the Prometheus Award for Fahrenheit 451.• And many more

Plot Summary• Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel set in the 24th century• A totalitarian government has banned the written word.

Main Characters:

Guy Montag – 35 year old fireman who takes pride and pleasure in what he does. He is married, people fear and respect him.

Clarisse McClellen – 17 year old girl that Guy Montag has taken a liking to. She is very curious and aware of the world around her unlike the rest of the population.

Captain Beatty – The captain of the firemen has been reading books but still agrees with burning them.

Mildred Montag - Mildred Montag is the wife of our main character Guy Montag. Her personality is the shallow complacent personality that Guy Montag comes to loathe.

Faber - A retired English professor and one of the few people left who still believe in books.

Issues raised in the book

Censorship

• It was within society itself where censorship was first introduced.

"What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the

middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.“ - Captain Beatty

Censorship

“When ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled and people constrained

in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us..

There isn’t an economic Internet and a social Internet and a political Internet.

There’s just the Internet.” - Hillary Clinton

(United States Secretary of State)

Censorship

• Bradbury alludes to the idea that different minority groups were offended by certain types of literature.

“Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn

the book.” – Captain Beatty.

Ignorance vs Knowledge• Destroy the written form of knowledge and promote ignorance in

order to make the population intellectually equal.

“We must all be alike, not everyone born free and equal like theconstitution says, but everyone made equal.”- Captain Beatty.

“Out of the nursery, into college and back into nursery, There’s your intellectual pattern for the past 5 centuries or more”

– Captain Beatty.

Ignorance vs Knowledge

Captain Beatty’s Utilitarian approach to society

“Public policies should be judged by their consequences” – John Stuart Mill.

• Society is happy to be spoon fed information, consume entertainment and accept regular violence with neither question nor a second thought as long as they are happy.

“If you don’t want a man politically unhappy don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him, give him one”. –

Captain Beatty.

Technology and its influence• Technology dominates society.

• Bradbury concentrates on the negative influence of technological development real world and the destructive potential of technology in the world

• Associations to addictive multimedia being used in present times.

Technology and its influence

• Faber describes three things missing from this futuristic world.

1. Quality of information2. The leisure to digest it3. The right to carry out actions based on what we

learn from the interaction of the first two.

Conclusion

Thank youAny Questions?