Response to The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
Technology’s function was to in better the lives of those who use it, yet when people become reliant on these artificial comforts the effects can be detrimental.
In Bradbury’s The Veldt, children become so attached and reliant on technology that parents function only to “punish” them. For the children, technology has been with them their entire lives and has nearly raised them. Technology is constantly evolving to improve, and improvement would be defined as removing a burden of some sort. Each generation in our society has faced a “burden” that the next generation will never face because of an advancement in technology. Now that the “burden” has been removed there is no need to learn the manual solution to the problem, the knowledge resides in the machine. For example, many people are reliant on a calculator or GPS. A younger generation may only have experience using a calculator to do long division, and thus doesn’t truly know how the solution is made.
The story brings into question people’s growing reliance on technology and how that will result in the future. The fear is that people will wish to live artificial lives: only living to look, listen and smell. Ultimately, as the story portrays, our releases from troubles may become trouble-inducing themselves. The transfer of knowledge from individuals to objects displaces the learning process. Why learn when it can be given? Thoughts like these can generate generations of people reliant on anything other than themselves.
Technology has indeed advanced society greatly (especially in the field of medicine) and is not something that needs to deplete, but rather people need to remember to appreciate life and the minuscule problems it gives us to solve allowing for us to experience things ourselves.
