danah boydSep 26, 2023
"The Screens are the Symptom" is a re-review of Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" in light of contemporary ideas of book banning, screens, children, and broader epistemic battles. http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2023/09/26/the-screens-are-the-symptom.html
The Screens are the Symptom. | danah boyd | apophenia

Show threadCory DoctorowSep 26, 2023
@zephoria To his dying day, Bradbury insisted that F451 wasn't an anti-censorship novel, but rather an anti-TV novel.
Show threaddanah boydSep 26, 2023
@pluralistic ::laugh:: and yet he positioned them as the medium presented in response to censorship that also kept the people distracted from the war that was about to destroy them while those who survived wanted books to thrive.
Show threadCory Doctorow

@zephoria I always treated this as proof that writers - including me - have no idea what we're doing, something I tell high-school kids who have the clever idea of answering their teacher's assigned question, "What did Doctorow intend in this passage" by emailing me and asking for my answer.

"Don't ask me - I'm not nearly as smart as Bradbury was, and he was an idiot on this stuff. What hope do I have?"

Sep 26, 2023 at 11:33pmWeb