Technology in Fahrenheit 451

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury writes a lot about the adaption of technology in the futuristic society compared to when the book was written in 1950. I find it very interesting what Bradbury has included. For example, the cars in the story usually go over one hundred miles per hour. Therefore, the billboards along the road have to be very, very big. Bradbury states in the book that the billboards are built over two hundred feet long so that people will be able to easily read the ads on them as they speed by in a car. I never thought about advertising in the future like that. I figured that in the future, cars will be able to go a lot faster than they do today, but I never thought about the effect that fast cars would have on billboards and advertising. I found that very interesting. It makes me wonder what else businesses would have to do to adapt their advertisements in a futuristic society. Another thing that I found interesting in Bradbury’s was the “hound” that the police use to catch convicts. Obviously, today the closest things we have to a “hound” are actual dogs that are used to sniff out the path of convicts to catch them. It makes me wonder if we will ever have the technology in my lifetime to be able to build a machine like that. It would be unbelievable if there was a machine that could hunt down criminals to the point where it was nearly impossible to escape. It makes me wonder if there would be dramatic drop in crime because criminals would know that it would almost be impossible to escape the law enforcement. Other than those two examples, there were not many more examples of futuristic technology that stood out to me besides the concepts that Bradbury presented with the two hundred foot billboards and the “hound” that would be used by the police. These concepts made me interested in the book and I did not want to put it down.