Theme Connection Activity
Landry Ray and Sunny Bowden
Article-Short Story Connection
In the article, the author emphasizes the societies growing trend toward ubiquitous technology, and our habit of using it to replace time better spent with human contact or self-reflection. In “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury, both of these themes are evident. They are shown in the article when the author claims that when people should be “sleeping or relaxing with [their] family,” they are too distracted by the millions of notifications lighting up their screens (Mossberg 2). With work so easily accessible through devices, many people seem to live at their office round clock, and the line between home life and work life has been blurred. In “The Veldt”, when the children return home from their long day out, they go straight to play in their interactive nursery, instead of stopping to talk to their parents. The lack of communication creates a hyper-reality in the children’s minds where they believe that the machines are their family instead of their parents. The parents bought the children the nursery, and their over-dependence on the screen walls is shown when they murder their own parents just so they can keep it, just as it seems everyone in our world thinks they wouldn’t survive without their smart phones. The article describes our ever-advancing technology, and a world that is getting closer and closer to the virtual reality that “The Veldt” warned us of.
Short Story, Poem, Article, Fahrenheit 451 connection
The short story, poem, current event article, and Fahrenheit 451 all emphasize the replacement of human interaction with technology. In Fahrenheit 451, Clarisse and her family are considered “most particular” because her “mother and father and uncle [sit] around talking” with one another instead of racing fast cars or surrounding themselves with giant TVs (Bradbury 7). The people of society can’t understand why they would ever want to talk to each other, showing that technology has completely replaced any need for communication. All the other literary works describe this same situation, either with fake walls, smart phones, or TVs. Montag often frets about Millie’s disconnection with reality, because she spends all of her time either listening to the sea shell radio or spending time with her “family” in the TV walls. He even goes so far as to say that if he wanted to talk to her while she was laying inches away in their bed he would have to “buy himself an audio seashell broadcasting station [just to] talk to his wife” (Bradbury 39). By saying this, Bradbury shows not only a lack of interest in human interaction, but also a lack of ability. The technology is so addictive and detrimental that Millie is no longer able to hold a regular conversation. In all of these pieces of writing, technology destroys a societies ability to communicate, and ruins our peoples way of life