Ray Bradbury's short story, "The Fireman" was first published in February, 1951. It was adapted into a novel, Fahrenheit 451, two years later. In the novel, Bradbury prevents a dystopian view of a world in which information is controlled, and people who read (or think) are considered deviants. This essay will examine the implications of Bradbury's vision of the future in today's world.

Bradbury writes about a world in which information is controlled by a government-industry compact. Censorship has been taken to an extreme, and all books have been banned. Only mass-media is allowed, and this seems to take the form of television and comics. Both are carefully controlled so that no thought that provoke unrest are allowed to reach the people. (Indeed, the people seem to be willing to fiddle with their televisions until the point where their cities burn.)

Bradbury was justified in his views of mass media. In the 50s, Hollywood was regulated by the Hays Code, which equated to government control of everything that was produced. According to IMDB's glossary, "...under the Hays Code a filmmaker could not present revenge in modern times as being justified, nor could they depict details of how crimes were committed, or show a criminal profiting from crime." In this environment, coupled with the fact that television was only available from (in any area) at most a few stations, lead to a justifiable fear that its content could be controlled by the Government. Similar restrictions had been placed on comics, so Bradbury's choice of the surviving media seems to be a good one.

In half a century, some things change. While broadcast television still has some government censorship, cable (and satellite) channels are not affected by these restrictions. The Hays Code was demolished by the Supreme Court's ruling that films were protected by the First Amendment. Government control of comic books has similarly been removed. (Check out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund for more on this.) Apart from a few lingering echos, the government does not seem to assert control of the mass media.

Now we must turn our attention to the mass censorship of books that Bradbury predicted. This, has not come to pass. The current climate is one of support for the first amendment. The government does not seem to be censoring books on a national level. Interest groups are largely responsible for the censorship going on today.

Most of the censorship of books going on today does, however, fall into the categories that Bradbury predicted the first censorship would. This is censorship of two forms. The first is that of the interest groups demanding that books offensive to them be removed. This ranges from radical right-wing groups attempting to ban homosexual material to the NAACP suing for the removal of Huckleberry Finn. The second is that of Bowdlerism, the editing of a book without the author's consent. Bradbury himself was a victim of this when a censored version of Fahrenheit 451 was released in the 1970s. (A corrected version quickly replaced it when students of Bradbury's work pointed out the irony of this.)

This isn't to say that this sort of censorship is prevalent, however. Indeed, most attempts at banning a book today tend to make it more popular, as people rally against the censors. And, of course, this ignores the effect the Internet has had. (The Internet did not begin until 1969, well over a decade after Bradbury's novel was first published.)

One of the fundamental principles that the Internet was founded on was that "Information wants to be free." The culture that has sprung up around it is one that is outright hostile to censorship. This extends from online censorship (of which there is enough) to opposing censorship in the real world. As one way of doing this, sites have sprung up putting the text of banned books online. Carnegie-Mellon and Project Gutenberg both have sites in which banned (and other) material are placed on the web for anyone to download.

The most prevalent form of censorship today is one that Bradbury couldn't have predicted. Since the 1950s, the term of copyright has been increased from 28 to 95 years. As a result, access to financially unpopular titles has been denied to those who seek them. The net result is censorship that, while not as universal as the dystopia portrayed in Fahrenheit 451, is worrisome nonetheless.