Long before there was Anthony Weiner, Ray Bradbury knew what would happen. Technology would change us in ways that we never anticipated beforehand. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes, who knew?
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http://www.switched.com/2009/11/04/2001-geeks-rejoice-world-learns-why-hal-sang-daisy/
I started reading sci fi 1950
The names of writers read are with me still
The stories and the settings were so nifty
That I will not forget and never will
With writers like Del Rey and C. M. Kornbluth
All fans of great good writing got their wish
They gave you all the battered, bruised and torn truth
And so did Fredric Brown and good James Blish
Leigh Brackett was no slouch, nor was Ted Sturgeon
And Alfred Bester set my hair on fire
The thrill of seeing guys like Pohl emergin’
They wrote great stuff of which I never tire
With Bradbury and Clarke and of course Heinlein
Their stories and their worlds will never fade
To pick one I would have to walk a fine line
These were the finest writers ever made
I read them all and gloried in the telling
Of Asimov’s real worlds in blackest space
Where things I never dreamed seemed so compelling
And heroes fought with style and wit and grace
Fahrenheit 451, just like the video clip above, predicted 4-wall surround television, and the surround video reality shows “involved” the viewer in the show. Bradbury saw the future very clearly.
The story of Fahrenheit 451 is not that an overbearing police state stamps out valiant dissent, but that the overbearing police state gives people exactly what they want—meaningless around the clock stimulation, which makes them all too happy to hand over those dangerous books. Who wants to read a book when you can have endless reality media, and be a star, or at least a bit player, in your own show?
My reading habits have changed a lot, thanks to the internet, and not for the better. It doesn’t help to have any-time, on demand, streaming Netflix, with season-upon-season of television series, with no commercials, that you didn’t mind passing up on years ago. And then there’s any-time, on demand steaming music, which doens’t even allow you the satisfaction of hunting down the recorded music or going to a live performance. Trop de media.
But, on the other hand, no-limit family phone-text plans are great!
I never had any use for wall-to-wall ubiquitous media stimulation; I don’t even need music in the background (but get it anyway when out of the house).
Never understood the Walkman or the iPod — no appeal, and an invitation to obliviousness; the same with having a TV on while simultaneously being on the phone and performing some othe chore. I find all this a stupid way to go about a day. I don’t even like the idea of being plugged into an iPod or whatever while working out. The sounds of silence and of my thoughts work fine for me.
Reality TV is an abomination. There is no such thing as a good reality TV show, and neve will be. It baffles me that people want to actually watch somebody mediocre like themselves for hours; some of these reality shows — like that godawful one about the megalarbutts (“Biggest Losers”) flapping their manboobs goes on for two hours at a stretch. Think about that: at a time when attention spans are reduced to newt-like levels, many people will be transfixed for hours by a bunch of human cetaceans going through their paces. Un-frikkin-believable. Render them into votive candles and be done with it.
don rodrigo wrote:
“There is no such thing as a good reality TV show, and never will be.”
There’s no such thing as reality TV, period.
Once there’s a camera present, reality goes out the window.
That people watch that crap instead of having a life is yet another sad comment on our decline.
Don Rodrigo #4:
Back in the late 60′s, I think it was, I read a letter in TV Guide where a woman said she “was tired of watching TV shows with people who did not go to the bathroom.”
I could not figure out why characters on TV needed to go to the bathroom unless it was intrinsic to the story. In real life I have been about to enter the final countdown to launch a space booster and had to get up from the console to run to the bathroom. If someone had been depicting that moment of drama in a TV show, what would have that added? It certainly did not add to the experience it in real life.
I can remember maybe one TV show where the plot involved someone, such as a newlywed, getting locked in the bathroom as their spouse desperately tries to get them out, but that’s about it. Other than that it adds nothing.
What this really showed was there are people with lives so shallow that they need to see “real life” on TV. And as we all really know, it ain’t real life anyway.
One cold winter in Eugene Oregon I would spend Sunday mornings taking hot baths while reading Bradbury’s short stories. My all time favorite was titled – The Screaming Lady.
I later was surprised to see his name given screenplay credits on Moby Dick. I hadn’t known.
The porn filters on the internet are pretty good now. But before 2000 there was a lot of unfiltered porn spam. It took a whole new discipline to learn not to click on the porn spam that came into your inbox. It was a discipline that was not easily mastered. I went to a conservative christian church at the time. There would be men’s meetings devoted talking about the subject because everyone was being blind sided. It would have been similar to discussions a decade earlier about while on a business trip–not watching porn in the hotel room or cheating on your wife. A new discipline was called for.
My landlord several years ago was Ray Bradbury’s best friend when they were growing up, and he visited periodically when his friend Ed bacame an invalid. They skipped a lot of school when they were young to do more educational things, like visiting Hollywood sets.
Some of his friends thought Ray was crazy when he was in high school, because the wheels were already turning in his mind. He kept coming up with new projects long past the age when most people retire.
k/9, he and Arthur C. Clarke –what a pair of cowboy space cadets –what an era –
The types of changes that a “search engine” such as the IBM Watson, shown competing on Jeopardy, and winning against the human contestants, is something that will change so many things.
15 years ago, Google was still an idea in the minds of a couple of graduate students; now I access it every day. If I need to know something, I immediately go there (or to Yahoo, or Bing…) Not that my memory was ever that great to begin with…
But with Watson, you don’t need to even think about how to formulate your search criteria; just ask your question.
So why would anyone ever need to remember anything? In fact, why would anyone need to even analyze, or think a problem through for themselves, if the answer is a just “a click away”??
My very favorite short story by Ray Bradbury was “The Murderer” in “The Golden Apples Of The Sun” collection. I remember it every time I’m stuck some place listening to people’s inane chatter to their cell phones (or to their Bluetooth receivers). And just as Bradbury wrote in his story, the chatter is never anything of interest or even any urgency.