Fahrenheit 451 Argumentative Essay

When you look around at the children of today, what do you see? Most likely, you see kids absorbed by cell phones, iPads, portable video games, and other electronic devices. How often, however, do you see a child consumed by a book? It’s probable that the occurrence of such is rare. More importantly, how often do you spend reading instead of allowing yourself to be overtaken by infectious and addicting technology? If you’re anything like the rest of today’s society, reading probably doesn’t make it to the top of your “to do” list. “…You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” As Ray Bradbury foreshadows, people are indeed slowly beginning to cease reading. I could not agree more with his opinion that putting an end to such will, in fact, destroy a culture.

While people may die, words will not. The textbooks we read in school are created for the use of passing on knowledge and valuable information. By record keeping, we do not forget events or words from the past. While some words or opinions may not be what we want to hear, it’s vital for us to take into consideration other viewpoints besides our own in order to open our eyes to the world around us. In Ray Bradbury’s book “Fahrenheit 451”, the plot is set in a society where books are banned in order to avoid conflict created from others being “offended” by what a book may say. This, however, is putting an end to individuality. By living in a world where anything that could potentially cause upset is forbidden, society becomes uniform. The color and variety of life, whether good or bad, is erased and our lives become bland. This in itself destroys a culture.

One may argue that technology has the same effect when it comes to passing on information. While in some ways this may be true, we must keep in mind that the internet is all connected through a system. If a glitch in the system occurs, or something is deleted, it’s gone. You cannot get that valuable information back. With books however, the information isn’t controlled by electronics. The information is solid at your fingertips. You can make many copies with the comforting truth that if one gets lost, there are others readily available. Books do not rely on a system, on electricity, and are not connected to wires. Books are dependable, reliable sources of information.