Ray Bradbury Still Hates The Internet
from the well,-he's-way-over-30 dept
Karl points us to an interview with Ray Bradbury where he rails against the internet:"The Internet is a big distraction," Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.Tell us what you really think, Ray. Though, actually, this isn't a surprise. Way back in 2001, we wrote about another interview with him, where he called the internet a "scam" perpetrated by computer companies. If all this seems strange for the guy who wrote Farenheit 451 about the evils of book burning and the wonders of being able to access all kinds of information... it turns out that's because we all (including his biographer) misunderstood Farenheit 451. In an interview a couple years ago, Bradbury explained that the book wasn't about censorship at all. It was really about the evils of technology such as television:
"Yahoo called me eight weeks ago," he said, voice rising. "They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? 'To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.'
"It's distracting," he continued. "It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.So it turns out he just loves books. That's it. Not the ability to get more content or be able to read more. Books. Physical books. None of this "air" stuff and those annoying "factoids." Perhaps, as he gets close to being 90 years old, he's simply proving the point that fellow science fiction author Douglas Adams once wrote:
"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;I would imagine that point 3 gets worse over time... even if you're an acclaimed science fiction writer.
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
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Filed Under: ray bradbury
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Senility strikes RB!
Sorry Ray, but you need to get with the times. I'm an old codger myself (60+) now, and though there is a lot to dislike about the internet, there is a LOT that would be impossible without it, like being able to talk (and video) for free with my family that is spread all over the globe!
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Re: Senility strikes RB!
I don't think he really had so much to with directing or producing the show. I think it was more like they paid to use his name and some of his stories. Not like, for example, Hitchcock.
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Be fair
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Re: Be fair
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I assume you are joking about this, but under the circumstances it's in poor taste. Books and the internet both have their place in the world. It isn't a contest no matter what the opinions of some authors. Be educated, be aware and you'll be living the concept behind the book better than he is.
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And whose Schwartz is bigger than yours...
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I've got nothing against anyone who posts here, nothing personal at least. But I believe that what we say online, even anonymously or though a joking persona, has a value and an impact. People are informed from it to a personal extent and I'd rather have the detail I added be part of this conversation than not speak up. Even at the cost of sounding too serious, which I'm aware is a capital offense in some corners of the net.
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"I've got nothing against anyone who posts here, nothing personal at least."
Nor do I. Love you buddy.
"But I believe that what we say online, even anonymously or though a joking persona, has a value and an impact."
Me too. Tried to make an impact through humor. The image in my mind of burning books in front of RB's house has a very strong, albeit sophmoric/South-Parkish appeal to me.
"Even at the cost of sounding too serious, which I'm aware is a capital offense in some corners of the net."
I have dispatched Mega-Maid to suck all of the air from your immediate surroundings. Other than that, we're good.
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Not only did I find what I was looking for, I emerged with an old Patrick O'Brian novel, a guide on SLR Cameras and a copy of Locke's essay on Human Understanding. I'd found more interesting content in 10 minutes of walking round a library then an entire days worth of carefully customised RSS feeds had brought me.
Looking past the easily-critiqued technophobia of Ray Bradbury I believe he has a point; Libraries are worth preserving.
The internet, while a brilliant means of communication, suffers from an extreme form of...sympathetic resonance. People gravitate to sites and content that supports what they already believe in. Is that really a good way to learn?
The thing that digital content has never really been able to replicate from the physical (despite the best efforts of Netflix/Amazon) is Serendipity.
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The Internet is all about serendipity. Don't get me wrong, I love all my libraries. I've got three I visit on a regular basis and I use the online system to request books that I see on the Internet that I'm too cheap to buy.
However, sites like popurls, Digg, Slashdot and Metafilter regularly led me down very weird paths full of new learning and the best part is I can just bookmark it and come back to it later. I never have to return the link like a library book.
Also, nothing against real books, but 1 thumb drive holds about a bazillion books. I like the feel of a real book in my hands, but since I don't own a secret underground lair, my bookshelf space is very limited.
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Re: Re: The Internet UR doing it wrong.
Indeed, but such sites are ultimately the product of their communities, and for voteup/votedown models (as Reddit and Digg use) the content that comes up to the top of the pile is what has the best general appeal for that community. It becomes this self-reinforcing loop where all descent is quickly voted out.
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Sadly as everything becomes marketed and everyone has an angle for money things get dumbed down. Everything not a quick google search away is impossibly far away. Games have become rather boring, if you strip away all the razzle dazzle flashy stuff most big ticket games now a days are barely better than Pong.
Movies are devolving to action and sex and can't even be bothered with an interesting plot twist... or a plot twist at all!
TV Shows are moving towards displaying real life for everyone to see, because we can't pay writers to write thought provoking ideas.
Is it sad and regrettable that people would rather listen to a minute of a dude talking about capping dudes and smoking weed than sit down and listen to Mozart? Sure.
However is it wrong? No it's not wrong, it's just how the world works. We live in a society that is driven by money. If libraries die its because they couldn't make money. Not because internet goons came over and burned all the books.
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Re: Re: But we never said kill the library...
Indeed, Mike didn't cover that part of the article. But it was the message Bradbury was trying to get across.
"We live in a society that is driven by money. If libraries die its because they couldn't make money. Not because internet goons came over and burned all the books."
This isn't about those with money deciding what has value in society, as libraries are nearly always publicly funded services. Libraries exist to elevate those without any money as much as anything else.
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> everyone to see, because we can't pay writers to write
> thought provoking ideas.
No. Reality TV is a side effect of a writers strike. It's all about avoiding the cost of real writers and possibly avoiding a lot of the production costs of "normal TV" as well.
Those that write for a living are still quite capable of producing work of substance. The real question is whether or not those that buy this stuff (TV networks) want to bother.
In that regard, any medium that gets artists closer to those that consume the work is ultimately better. The problem with TV is not the technology but the supply chain associated with getting material produced. TV and movies are expensive to produce and TV in particular is made to sell advertisements.
The advantage of books is not so much the lack of shiny things but the fact that one can be produced by one guy with nothing more than a typewriter. You might even get an opportunity to hear this guy read his work to you at a local con.
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Not only did I find what I was looking for, I emerged with an old Patrick O'Brian novel, a guide on SLR Cameras and a copy of Locke's essay on Human Understanding. I'd found more interesting content in 10 minutes of walking round a library then an entire days worth of carefully customised RSS feeds had brought me.
I looked high and low for a particular book - couldn't find it at the library - yes; I do go there on occasion. I did; however, find it on Amazon - and a used book store in my area. The used book store won out on that - but I would have bought it from Amazon otherwise.
The internet has been one of the best tools ever developed to find books... lol
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Indeed, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
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> I dutifully trudged into town to scour the (last) two
> bookshops for a copy. My search was fruitless, and as a
> last resort ventured into the local library for the first
> time in several years.
The last time this happened to me I picked up an electronic copy of the relevant tome online. Fortunately the author in question isn't a luddite and he has many of his earlier works available online as teasers.
Now I have a rediculous number of his books in hardcover no less.
Any library or bookstore is what you make of it. You can just as easily fixate on the manga or romance section as you can some other part of it that you can get pretensious over.
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WRONG Bradbury! I know Napoleon likes water parks from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure"
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a) the world and his dog are just too stupid
or
b) Bradbury just isn't as good a writer as he is cracked up to be
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Re: Misunderstood?
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Different Things to Different People... inadvertently.
I can see the intended theme in Farenheit 451 now that it's pointed out, but that wasn't what I walked away with. I did get a strong distrust of marketing. The scene on the train with everyone singing to jingles still causes me to ask anyone doing it around me to please stop. I had some trouble resolving the "Art as Advertising" idea because of it. There was a line; art over here, ads over there. But I realized that it wasn't really so, there was no functional difference. I've focused more on the mechanics of advertisement and how it effects my decision making (no, I am not thinking Arby's). I still won't abide by people singing along with radio jingles and actively avoid the normal steady drone of tasteless and banal marketing that is thrown at me. But now I'm not above checking out a funny commercial on the internet once one is pointed out or acknowledging a well done ad I accidentally catch on TV.
Mr. Bradbury is allowed to get as crotchety as he likes and he's doing a good thing for a valuable media by supporting print books. To the best of my knowledge he hasn't put his weight behind the destruction of the internet. He's allowed his opinions and he's still a great man in my book.
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Re: Different Things to Different People... inadvertently.
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Oh yeah and paper sucks.
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All the same, it's just a matter of what people WANT to look for.
Sure; you can sit and rot your brain watching idiotic cartoons all day or watch a documentary on Shakespeare - the idea is to have enough content to please many different people - like a library.
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Ray
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I think he's just becoming senile.
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New World Order
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Re: New World Order
Ok, how about this as a measured response to Bradbury: The man is obviously a fool, a Luddite, and a curmudgeon. One quick scan of the current news out of Iran should show intelligent people that the internet has a little more to offer than "nothing". For all you can say about the internet, and I agree, you can say a lot that's negative, at the very least the internet has given governments & regimes pause. A bit more than pause actually.
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Re: New World Order
And that includes those with opinions about Ray Bradbury.
Pot, meet Kettle.
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What Mr. Bradbury somehow manages to miss here is that the real value of a book is "in the air somewhere" as well, being that the real value of a book comes not from the paper or the ink, but from the information contained within. What is information? It is not the letters or words, it is simply something that happens within your brain as you read the words on the page and interpret them. A book in and of itself, sans the intangible information is entirely meaningless.
I would like to say that I ought to give Mr. Bradbury a break on this one, but it really does bother me quite a bit that a visionary such as himself could be so short-sighted and closed-minded, even at the age of 90.
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That's the interpretation I was taught in high school, way back in late the 70s. My teacher stressed again and again that Bradbury was not arguing against any sort of censorship of ideas, but against how technology trivializes ideas, to the point where ideas have no meaning.
To put it another way, the government in Farenheit 451 did not censor books because the ideas were dangerous, the people of Farenheit 451 wanted books banned because they were conditioned by technology to find the discussion of real ideas to be unpleasant.
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Ray's love of books (and libraries?)
When the old analog world of crotchety old guys shut the libraries down (their choice of service to shut down to save money was truly weird) much of the opposition to closure was expressed & organized using Ray's dreaded internet. Doug Adams was right about Ray.
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Factoidal Internet and TV...
In school we were practically taught to worship factoids and meditate over them so that we could have great success in our factoidal tests and quizzes. Sadly, I even remember so-called essay questions where the answers were expected to be completely unstructured lists of facts rather than any meaningful arrangement of the course content.
No, I don't think technology is somehow evil. We are.
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In the air somewhere?
The same thing could be said about friendship or any other personal relationship -- And relationships are what a lot of the internet is all about. Older people especially come to the internet just to reconnect with family and friends.
Bradbury might not need relationships since he's rich and famous, so he can just wall himself off with his books.
(Hmm, remind you of a Twilight Zone episode?)
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can you blame him?
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Ray Bradbury
I've been reading his stuff for a long time.
Better late than never I finally got published myself. You can read about it at:
www.StrategicBookPublishing.com/ScienceFictionandAlternateHistory.html
Or check out a few of my other short science fiction stories at: http://www.sffworld.com/community/story/3744p0.html
Cheers
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Give Him Some Slack
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maybe
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