Did Ray Bradbury predict the future?

[wulfbourne]

http://theburningplatform.com/blog/

 

“Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries of more. School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?†– Captain Beatty in Fahrenheit 451

 

Ray Bradbury wrote his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 in 1950. Most kids were required to read this book when they were seventeen years old. Having just re-read the novel at the age of forty-seven makes you realize how little you knew at seventeen. It is 165 pages of keen insights into today’s American society. Bradbury’s hedonistic dark future has come to pass. His worst fears have been realized. The American public has willingly chosen to be distracted and entertained by electronic gadgets 24 hours per day. Today, reading books is for old fogies. Most people think Bradbury’s novel was a warning about censorship. It was not. It was a warning about TV and radio turning the minds of Americans to mush.

 

It is now sixty years later and his warning went unheeded. A self imposed ignorance by a vast swath of Americans is reflected in these statistics:

 

33% of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

42% of college graduates never read another book after college.

80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

70% of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

57% of new books are not read to completion.

There are over 17,000 radio stations and over 2,000 TV stations in America today.

Each day in the U.S., people spend on average 4.7 hours watching TV, 3 hours listening to the radio and 14 minutes reading magazines.

The projected average number of hours an individual (12 and older) will spend watching television this year is 1,750.

In a 65-year life, the average person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube.

Number of 30-second TV commercials seen in a year by an average child – 20,000

Number of videos rented daily in the U.S. – 6 million

Number of public library items checked out daily – 3 million

Percentage of Americans who can name The Three Stooges – 59%

Percentage who can name at least three justices of the U.S. Supreme Court – 17%

 

 

You can read the rest of the article yourself. It's a good but scary read. The statistics in the beginning make me want to go cry. If this is where we're at now, where will we be in 20 years?