Ray Bradbury: 10 of his most prescient predictions
The imaginative Pulitzer Prize-winning author often wrote about the intersection of technology and modern life. Here, The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama identifies 10 ways in which the novelist foresaw the trends and gadgets of the digital era.
The people in the “Fahrenheit 451” society sport “seashells” and “thimble radios,” which bear a striking resemblance to the earbuds and Bluetooth headsets of today.
This commenter is a Washington Post contributor. Post contributors aren’t staff, but may write articles or columns. In some cases, contributors are sources or experts quoted in a story.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
![The loneliness that can come from constantly paying attention to the screens around you, rather than the life around you, is a prevalent theme in Bradbury’s work. He explores it in his short story “The Pedestrian,” in which protagonist Leonard Mead is arrested for the dual crimes of taking a walk and not owning a television. Far ahead of the research and analysis that have spawned books on the effects of technology overload, such as Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together,” Bradbury outlined how he feared televisions would change the world. In this passage, he compares a neighborhood of television-watchers to a tomb: “[He] would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind he windows. Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomblike building was still open.”](/rf/image_606w/WashingtonPost/Content/Production/Blogs/post-tech/Images/GYI0063501038.jpg)
Loading...
Comments