I will start with this quote because it can be relevant to this essay: “Democracy is always a work in progress, it’s never an absolute idea or it would otherwise be a totalitarian ideology just like all the rest of them.” José Mujica, President of Uruguay (2010–2015).
You might have read Fahrenheit 451 for an English class at some point and probably didn’t listen to the teacher’s analysis. You probably remember that it is about a dystopian society where books are burned by firemen that don’t stop fires anymore but start them. It makes us think about the past when books were burned as censorship. Fahrenheit 451 was written in 1953 and was greatly influenced by its time. But I will not talk to you about how Fahrenheit 451 tells us to look at historical events but rather how Fahrenheit 451 teaches us lessons for the future. Social media has put us in our bubble, an unbreakable bubble. We are able to go online and look at our “feed” forever and ever always see things that we like and that we want to see. Those platforms that give us dopamine hits in the brain whenever we share, like, comment, or scroll don’t want you to get upset and leave. And we love it, we love seeing information that is easy to read and that agrees with us, we love imagining that we are learning, and we love being right. We love upsetting others online, but if we stay in our bubble then we will be fine.
The story follows the life of Guy Montag, a fireman who begins to question the status quo and his role in it after meeting his neighbor Clarisse. Montag’s curiosity leads him to secretly read books and eventually he becomes a fugitive hunted by the government’s mechanical hound.
In Fahrenheit 451 there is this interesting (very long) quote. When Montag asks why books got banned, he gets this answer:
“Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population […] Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending […] Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals […] Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. […] She didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl’s better off dead”.
People censor themselves, no one took over. Just everyone in their bubble, in their small minority where everything is accepted. Where people are allowed to create their own truth. Everyone accepted the information that was given to them, staying in their bubble and not confronting what didn’t like. The future described by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 becomes a post-technological story where society starts to burn complex knowledge and stories, drowning us in ignorance.
We have to be extremely careful not to censor ourselves in this age where already good information is becoming hard to find, with bad press, social media, and fake news everywhere. Has long political discussion disappeared? Is the future of our democracies at stake with now people tweeting about everything? People don’t read the articles anymore, they read 140 characters titles about news, politics, finance, tech, and books… We don’t take the time to learn anything, we just accept learning many facts by making every issue binary. We don’t take the time to talk and listen, to discuss with our neighbors. We see the United States with the republicans and democrats separated like never before. Everyone seems divided about everything, even about climate change or about the flatness of the earth. We see a community of people online that are so stuck in their bubble that they created their own truth about the shape of the earth. We can’t dismiss the importance of the internet, in the world, connecting people, making the world a better place, giving a voice to people that didn’t have one. Sharing knowledge (hopefully freely and openly) helping to reduce inequalities all around the world. We still see the power of the #blacklivematter and the #metoo movement, they both started online and helped to start a discussion that would have been otherwise difficult.
During the Egyptian revolution, fueled by social media discussion which led to 3 days of violent protest making the government shut down the internet. This made people go outside and talk to their neighbors, and it decentralized the revolution. There were no centralized meeting points but just people going in the street to talk and discuss, not share and likes online anymore. This led to the most violent day of protest on the 4th day. It was on that night that the revolution started.
How we should be talking together to build and not destroy what others have created. More importantly, we will have to adapt the way we think about democracies, the world is moving fast but our democracies are staying the same. So is the internet bad for democracy? The short answer is that it will be dangerous if we don’t change the way our democracies work. The internet will shape how we think about the future and has been a huge revolution in many fields. It is something that is new and we have to think about how it might affect our future. So go read, touch and look at some books! Take the time to understand, take your time and discuss with others. Open books and go through the pages, you will never lose your time. And if you don’t know which one to read next, you start with Fahrenheit 451.
PS: Here is another good quote from Fahrenheit 451
“You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. 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.”