In “The Pedestrian,” mankind advances to where the technology takes over their lives and even focuses less on relationships. Leonard Mead is taking a walk when a police officer comes by and questions his actions, “‘Where are you taking me?...To the Psychiatric Center for Regressive Tendencies’” (5). In society today, it is not unusual to take a walk outside. Everyone is too invested in staying home and watching TV, and it is seen as peculiar to be out. The police officer represents control of the government when Mead is to be taken to a mental facility for doing the basic human thing.
The streets are silent and “In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one, in all that time” (98). Everyone is so occupied with watching TV, it is all they are doing. Instead of socializing, they sit around. This conveys their disregard to family which incites that relationships are demolishing since they are not focused on it. The streets are silent and Mead has never seen anyone out, because they are all inside, occupied with the T.V. Relationships are ruined because of the disregard for their surroundings, which is the result of man abusing technology.
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In “Fahrenheit 451,” the laws forbid books, and firefighters burn them instead, “Montag gazed to the wall with the typed lists of a million forbidden books” (34). In this novel, they have strict laws expected to be followed, and reading books can kill one. There is not as much freedom as they should be getting. They are being controlled and censorship is exemplified. If they had freedom, they would not be forbidden to do simple things, like reading. A machine that is used to go after people who illegally had books, “The Mechanical Hound slept, but did not sleep, lived, but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the fire-house” (24). They have a machine called the Mechanical Hound, which is built to tranquilize a person if they are caught with books.
The government puts people in harm’s way and this displays the control they put on everyone. If they had freedom, there would not be harmful control over something that does not put others in danger. There is total disregard for the citizens’ lives’, as they are put in this position for simply reading, only because the government does not want them to. This, therefore, elucidates the impression that strict laws are just one of the effects of control of the government. The book demonstrates a wide variety of government control and technology abuse, and the impacts it can have on society.
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