And in this sea of hectic reading, or no reading, I wonder where the people who are reading calmly and for pleasure are, because I would love to find my peers.
Nothing I've read in my twenty something years as a reader touched me so close to my heart as this story about a future where my most important passion (reading, obvs.) is forbidden. Books were a welcome scapism, became a soothing hour between work and grad school and most recently my almost full time endeavor, what would there be for me in a society that bans them?
The reflection I came to with this book, and how current its subject is today, started to form for the first time when I saw a minute counter on top of an article on The Guardian's website (my go to news outlet). It took me a while to understand that editors were actually telling people how much time it would actually take to read the words.
I understand it. We are given all pieces of information on the palm of their hands all day, every day. But should we select our reading by time? Isn't technology supposed to make working more efficient so you'd work less and have more time for pleasurable activities? And isn't reading it? Apparently 'no' is the answer to these questions.
Long gone are the days when people would sit and read a newspaper, let alone a book that has no erotic content in it (no judgemen there, this is only about attention spans, and trust me, erotica has caught my attention more times than not).
Yet, we keep finding ways to do our chores and obligations faster, so we have more time to chill. And chill became scrolling down a never ending feed on social media, and when you actually do trip over an article or a piece of good news, it tells you how much time of that feed scrolling you'll be missing, so you can factor if it's worth it to stop. To a large number of people, I dare say, it never is.
"down a never ending feed on social media, and when you actually do trip over an article or a piece of good news, it tells you how much time of that feed scrolling you'll be missing, so you can factor if it's worth it to stop. To a large number of people, I dare say, it never is."
Another crazy fad I've noticed on Instagram is the fact people are actually competing on who will read the most books in a year, weather to release content on it or simply mark the counter on their bios. And here I'll analyze the verb 'read'. How is that reading when it's content focused and time restricted? No wonder I've encountered mostly reviews and not thoughts on books during my research for creating my own content. And most were about 'fashionable books', new releases and so on.
So I see two problems. People who won't stop to read the simplest article for being too long and people who will read selections of trending books to release beautiful content on it before the hype around it fades.
How does Fahrenheit relate to this?
In Bradburry's Fahrenheit, books are banned. But reading as an activity that should mean healthy escapism and enlightenment is being lost, somewhat voluntarily. Especially in countries like mine (Brazil) where ignorance is a State project. If you are not nurtured to enjoy reading and understanding it's power, it will be an exhausting task, and governments that prey on ignorance will use it as an advantage to fast track agendas that benefit politicians, not people. If you think about our new book tax and the fact rich people are only consuming trend books for content, who is actually reading books that can change reality? Books like Fahrenheit?
"No wonder dystopies like Bradburry's shine light in a society that demonizes the written word. It is so much easier to steer people who outsourced their thinking to those in power."
I love speaking about the metaphorical power of books, but bringing it closer to earth, think of the current issue of fake news, for example. What media outlets are reliable if you were never taught how to search for reference or how to identify bait headlines? Schools are not here to provide you with critical thinking, but books and stories (and a great amount of discussion on those stories) can do that for you. No wonder dystopies like Bradburry's shine light in a society that demonizes the written word. It is so much easier to steer people who outsourced their thinking to those in power. And the brilliancy of the book, and what I have noticed is happening more and more in reality, is that people are doing it voluntarily, even if unaware.
Only a small group of people pride themselves in saying they are not readers, but in a world where our attention to a task or activity is stolen by social media in order to make us buy or sell products or even becoming a 'presence' online, creating content that isn't based on fact, history or referenced by science is almost a norm these days, and it is much easier to consume a video on Youtube that claims to have all the answers to your problems that spending a lifetime analyzing them all and coming to our own conclusions.
Bradburry wrote about an authoritarian government, much like the one some politicians in my country are trying to establish here, today. An ignorant world where troglodytes with guns have their day in the sun. And in the book, much like in reality, the powers that be knew that the only way to guarantee a political post forever is to keep feeding their truth to the masses and that the only way not to recognize those truths as lies is to keep the masses as ignorant as they can be.
Fahrenheit 451 could have been written yesterday it is so current, and because our society is walking towards this dystopian future where books are a joke in someone's Instagram story, you might as well read it so you know what to expect.
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