Fahrenheit 451 is a story based in a future dystopia where books have become against the law and firefighters use flamethrowers to destroy books. However, while these are a big part of the story and overall warning, technology in this story is also heavily used to influence how people see the world.

Within most houses, a Virtual Reality set is in a room, that is projected on the wall as a giant TV which is always spewing loads and loads of false information into people’s brains. Many people had become addicted to the VR, like Montag’s Wife, Millie. She had become so addicted that she wanted to install a fourth wall in a room so that she would have the walls talking to her everywhere she looked. These VR walls had people and voices in them that addicted people began to call ‘family’ as if they were real and a part of their lives. However, these voices were only able to provide opinions that were programmed into them, which was programmed by the government, meaning that all the information that was given was either false or edited to sound better than it actually was. This misuse of technology lead people to believe everything that was coming out of the VR walls to be true. This causes people to lose their opinions, and by losing opinions the people lose their individuality, causing them to be less and less human. Also, the loss of opinions causes people to stop challenging whether or not what they are being told is true, and while this causes less arguments, it does cause people to be less happy than what they would be if they had their own opinions and thoughts on issues that mattered.

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  1. This is cogent and insightful – really nicely done. I’ll ask you to use more quotations from the text in your over-all piece, but the quality of your discussion is already there.

    Great going.

    CW

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