Tired of the religion and politics threads having nothing at all to do with Bradbury?

Let's have a thread on Bradbury's inventions, and what happened to them in real life. For example:

In Fahrenheit 451, some people use seashell radios:

Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of the tomb, her eyes fixed in the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.

It seems that such devices were not far off at the time of the composition of F451:

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=456

But the real point of the device in F451 is to emphasis how people such as Mildred Montag are escaping, avoiding reality by losing themselves in audio which is disconnected from life.

Cut to thirty years later, and the whole planet in real life starts wandering around with the Walkman in pocket. Another twenty years and we had moved on to the iPod.

The technology is slightly different, so some would no doubt dismiss Bradbury's invention of the seashell. But the broader picture is that his assessment of human nature and of our cultural tendencies was spot on. We use our iPods precisely to escape from the immediate reality surrounding us.

I think the observation is a good one. We forget that technologies have impacts on our lifestyles and priorities. Bradbury was a master at that kind of observation.

Spot on! I was just saying to jkt during one of the performances of F451 last year that Ray invented the idea of the bluetooth earpiece and the widescreen flat TV over fifty years ago!

Not to mention the prediction that people would begin cutting themselves off from the world and pull into their own little world.

quote:

Originally posted by Mr. Dark:
I think the observation is a good one. We forget that technologies have impacts on our lifestyles and priorities. Bradbury was a master at that kind of observation.

"Was"?

Yeah, NBC Nightly News had a piece the other night claiming the Walkman was the first concept of portable music and I was like, "Hellooooo, guys? Transistor radios? Ray Bradbury, anyone?" Wonder if anyone wrote them expressing this. Maybe we should.

And, as far as attachment to our gizmos: as a kid, "The Murderer" was one of the funniest stories I ever read. Years later, it was one of the most unfunny TV episodes I ever saw. Now, "Exorcism" was one of the least funny episodes of Ray Bradbury Theater due to severe miscasting and poor direction as far as comic timing. It could still make a delightful film if done right. But "The Murderer," no way, perhaps never under any conditions even in the hands of a genius. It is just not funny seeing $300.00 gizmos destroyed right and left, and that was before I even had a cell phone let alone an iPod! (Both of which I now guard WITH MY LIFE. I got a case for my iPod and today I just got a case for the case!!!)

Speaking of attachment to material possessions, this was a yuppie joke back before even cell phones were widespread: a young man, in some versions of the joke a lawyer, was sideswiped in his car and was lamenting, "My Porsche! My beautiful Porsche!" An older, working-class man said, "You know, that's what I don't like about your (generation, or profession.) Your priorities are all screwed up. You're so hung up on that car you don't even realize your left arm has been mangled and you need medical attention." The yuppie/lawyer looked at his left arm and cried, "My Rolex! My beautiful Rolex!"

dandelion:

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2005/12/the_man_who_inv.html

quote:

Originally posted by dandelion:
Yeah, NBC Nightly News had a piece the other night claiming the Walkman was the first concept of portable music and I was like, "Hellooooo, guys? Transistor radios?...

Former Sony boss Akio Morita described the development of the first pocket transistor radios in his book. Although Sony made them as small as they could with the best technology available at the time (1950s), they ended up with a device that was too big for the average shirt pocket. So they have special shirts made for their salesman, with discretely oversized pcokets, all to emphasise the petiteness and portability of their invention.

Braling II. Good catch. Oops!

quote:

Originally posted by Doug Spaulding:
...Ray invented the idea of the bluetooth earpiece and the widescreen flat TV over fifty years ago...

Ah, the wide, flat TV... as seen in F451 and "The Veldt".

Again, the actual technology Bradbury described is a bit off. In "The Veldt" there is all sorts of mechanical stuff behind the giant TV - reels of film, projectors etc.

But Bradbury got the IMMERSION idea absolutely right. He saw how absorbing such technology would be for certain people under certain circumstances. He sensed how "art forms" would arise to exploit this absorption.

Notice how those who get the most out of Bradbury's wallscreen TVs are (a) children (Peter and Wendy) and (b) those lacking in intellect (Mildred Montag) and (c) those who had already sought ways of disconnecting themselves from the world (poor Mildred again).

What is most remarkable is that, although he was writing at the very dawn of wallscreen technology (the early days of TV, the early days of Cinerama), he intuited the intellectual and emotional reactions we might have to the technology once it had reached maturity.

quote:

Notice how those who get the most out of Bradbury's wallscreen TVs are (a) children (Peter and Wendy) and (b) those lacking in intellect (Mildred Montag) and (c) those who had already sought ways of disconnecting themselves from the world (poor Mildred again).

Phil: Great observation.

quote:

Originally posted by Mr. Dark:
Phil: Great observation.

Thank you, sir. However, after posting I had some second thoughts. I remembered that in "The Veldt" the inattentive parents get their comeuppance from the wallscreen. So in a sense it is THEY who get the most out of it. (It was their investment, and look how it paid off!)

Yes, well, the development of technology is always a mixed bag for Mr. Bradbury. His roots in home come out in many of his stories and books. His nostalgia for a simpler, home-based life is very strong in much of his writing. He seems "tempted" by technology. He fears it and its impact on man, but can't seem to stay away from it. He's like an addict.

quote:

Originally posted by Mr. Dark:
Yes, well, the development of technology is always a mixed bag for Mr. Bradbury. His roots in home come out in many of his stories and books. His nostalgia for a simpler, home-based life is very strong in much of his writing. He seems "tempted" by technology. He fears it and its impact on man, but can't seem to stay away from it. He's like an addict.

Ray is a social animal. He likes people and interacting with people. His fear about technology, from TVs to the Internet, is that it keeps people from fact-to-face interactions...chipping away at our humanity. He much prefers a pub in Ireland, a cafe in Paris or a park bench in any city park. A picnic at the beach is on his list, too. This is what he and his wife would do with Leigh Brackett and her husband.

Agreed.

Technology is a hand in a glove and the internet provides the ultimate hand.