Television has destroyed, and continues to desolate the desire to read. Throughout history television has replaced the leisure of reading with its mind-numbing tendencies. In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, he predicts that television and other technologies will completely replace books. In many aspects Bradbury’s prediction is becoming a reality, humans have replaced the great literatures of the world with trivial video games, and the paperback book has become obsolete with the new technology of the electronic book. The sole purpose of Bradbury’s novel was to explain that television is poisonous, and only contains “factoids”. Bradbury claims that “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.”, so that there is no longer a desire to read. In his novel he directly expresses this idea using Captian Beatty:
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Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”(Page 58). This idea still applies today in that television programs do publish sometimes useless ideas, facts, opinions, and information by way of instant satisfaction. Instant satisfaction, of course, is much easier to enjoy than a satisfaction that may have had to been worked to achieve, such as reading a novel. Most people in fact are content with being filled with these “factoids”, which leads to the next quote. In this quote professor Faber is explaining why most normal people cannot peal themselves from the television. “"Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, ‘Hold on a moment.’ You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it
Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”(Page 58). This idea still applies today in that television programs do publish sometimes useless ideas, facts, opinions, and information by way of instant satisfaction. Instant satisfaction, of course, is much easier to enjoy than a satisfaction that may have had to been worked to achieve, such as reading a novel. Most people in fact are content with being filled with these “factoids”, which leads to the next quote. In this quote professor Faber is explaining why most normal people cannot peal themselves from the television. “"Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, ‘Hold on a moment.’ You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it