Ray Bradbury Loves Libraries, Hates the Internet

Hugh Pickens was one of several readers to let us know that, according to a NY Times story, the 89-year-old Ray Bradbury hates the Internet. But he loves libraries, and is helping raise $280,000 to keep libraries in Ventura County open. "Among Mr. Bradbury's passions, none burn quite as hot as his lifelong enthusiasm for halls of books. ... 'Libraries raised me,' Mr. Bradbury said. 'I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.' ... The Internet? Don't get him started. 'The Internet is a big distraction,' Mr. Bradbury barked... 'Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,' he said, voice rising. 'They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet." It's distracting. It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.'"

Comments

God Bless Him

[tjstork]

There's a lot to be said for libraries. The other day, my wife came home with a new library card. Big internet a holic, but there's always something about halls of books.

Re:God Bless Him

[spire3661]

Technically, the internet is the largest library of information ever known to man. To dismiss it only shows his inability to truly grasp it.

Re:God Bless Him

[Brian Gordon]

I agree; what an idiot. There's more useful, educational information instantly available on the internet than any library in the world will ever hold. Just because he's too old and blind to find anything other than Yahoo games doesn't mean that the internet is distracting and meaningless. I'm sure Wikipedia alone has orders of magnitude more educational reading material than you could read going to the library three times a week for generations.

Re:God Bless Him

[Runaway1956]

Certainly not an idiot. Out of his element, yes, but absolutely NOT an idiot. I'm almost two decades younger than Bradbury, but I can sympathize with him. The internet can confuse even the young bright boys - just start a discussion on internet security, and see how many really smart young people get lost real fast.

Books. I find myself reading more and more of my favorites on the LCD screen, but books have something that the computer will never have. Books are solid, and real - the pixels on my screen are fleeting. A solid book and a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter's night, listening to the storm blow outside......

Oh well, either you remember it and love it, or you don't.

But, don't call the old dude an idiot. Bradbury may not rank with Asimov and Clarke, but he a bright enough star in the SciFi and fantasy firmament. Never an idiot.

Re:God Bless Him

[rubycodez]

Just one example, there are many handbooks for the design, estimating, scheduling, and construction of buildings, roads and bridges that are not to be found on the internet. I have a shelf of those, and a good library will have them too. I have references for other fields for which internet resources are very scant except for popular general overview. Sure, CADD/CAE/CAM software can do some things, but not all. Most of man's knowledge is not on the internet, and it's tragic that young people think that because many popular things of the last ten years are there then most things are there.

Re:God Bless Him

[mellon]

Laugh if you want, but keeping digital data is hard. Really hard. Once you've printed a book on acid-free paper with good quality ink, you can pretty much assume it'll still be readable in a hundred years. The lifetime of most computer media is measured in years, not decades. And most printouts fade quickly, because they're done on laser paper, which doesn't last very long.

So I wouldn't accuse Mr. Bradbury of being senile just yet. I agree he's a curmudgeon, but we need curmudgeons to keep us honest.

OBTW... Get off my lawn!

Punk. :')

Re:God Bless Him

[westlake]

I agree; what an idiot. There's more useful, educational information instantly available on the internet than any library in the world will ever hold. Just because he's too old and blind to find anything other than Yahoo games doesn't mean that the internet is distracting and meaningless

The library organizes information. It attempts to separate the meaningful from the meaningless. It is outward looking - not inward looking.

In following the threads here on the Thomas case -
some things become painfully obvious:

The geek doesn't understand the most basic distinctions between civil and criminal law.

He doesn't understand evidence, the burden of proof.

He doesn't know how a jury is selected.
He doesn't understand the roles played by the plaintiff and defendant, the judge, the jury, the court of appeals.

It is easier for him to find refuge in talk of conspiracies, in talk of corruption.

The geek has access to infinite information - or at least thinks he does.

But mostly he listens to himself. He tunes out dissenting voices. He doesn't ask the right questions - and again and again he makes the same mistakes.

I'm sure Wikipedia alone has orders of magnitude more educational reading material than you could read going to the library three times a week for generations.

But why are you sure?

The geek likes big numbers. The geek trusts big numbers. The number of apps in his distro's repository. The number of pages in his Wiki....

Re:God Bless Him

[Workaphobia]

Open wikipedia in a tabbed browser. Go to a topic you're moderately interested in. Open every hyperlink you think you might like in a new tab. After about an hour, count up the tabs you have. If they're fewer than 10, something's very wrong with your sense of curiosity.

Make a list of the topics, then go to the library and lookup appropriate physical books that describe the same subjects. See how much you can learn by reading those while allotting yourself only the same amount of time you give yourself to read wikipedia. Compare how much you learn.

Re:God Bless Him

[vic-traill]

How do you know our civilization's ability to produce personal computers isn't going to vanish. At least a book is good for three centuries on proper paper, is our ability to produce hard drives so robust?

I'll echo this sentiment w/ a reference to A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller Jr., as well as noting that although I have documents stored on 720k, three and a half inch floppies within arm's reach, I've got no similarly handy way way to retrieve those docs.

Obviously the fact that they're orphaned on a media for which I have no required hardware is my own fault, but it does serve as an example to illustrate the temporal nature of contemporary storage. I have a hardcover book from the 1920's in great shape, very readable and physically robust; yet even a printout of my fourth year honours thesis (one of the docs stored on the aforementioned disks) would be in rough shape by now had I printed it using the 9-pin dot matrix printer I had 20 years ago.

I can guarantee that there will be *no* post-apocalyptic need for anything I cranked out in 1989. But I take Miller's central question to heart - how to preserve man's scientific knowledge so that we're not doomed to rediscover electricity (or whatever) again and again? Forever is a long, long time.

Re:God Bless Him

[iron-kurton]

The point isn't how hard it is to store digital data, or how long a single instance of digital data can last. The point is how easy it is to copy it. Replicating print can be time-consuming and expensive. Replicating bits on a drive is fast and cheap.

And in other news, old man shouts at cloud

[jollyreaper]

Old Man Ray is also a flaming Republican. Sad to think of it since his work is so enjoyable but that's the long and the short of it. He went apeshit over Fahrenheit 9-11.

"No. 1, he didn't ask (permission), and, No. 2, he took it - period," Bradbury tells PEOPLE. "Even if he did ask, what he has done is a crime."

Speaking from his Los Angeles home Wednesday, the 83-year-old author says he never would have allowed Moore to use the name, "because it doesn't belong to him. It belongs to me. I have several new editions of the book coming out this summer. I have a new film version of Fahrenheit 451 with Mel Gibson starring, and it is going into production sometime in the next six months."

Bradbury says that Moore, 50, contacted him only last Saturday - months after the controversial movie started making headlines.

"He was embarrassed because he didn't want to call me," says Bradbury, adding that he felt Moore was "forced into" making the call and that the filmmaker hasn't offered to screen the film for him.

"He didn't want to face me," says Bradbury. "He is supposedly a big fan of mine and read my work years ago. Now suddenly he has to call someone he has been reading for most of his life and apologize for what he did."

Re:And in other news, old man shouts at cloud

[fyoder]

Republicans weren't so bad way back when they believed in small gov't and fiscal responsibility. Even if one believed that gov't had a role to play in society beyond simply maintaining the courts and providing for defense, one could still get along with, and even appreciate the perspective of, the old Republicans. A lot of old folk who call themselves Republicans may not be whatever the fuck today's Republicans are.

Re:Internet

[shma]

To make an obvious point: You can ban books, you can burn books, but try to remove a literary work from the Internet and see how far you get.

Hmmm..

[tjstork]

I agree; what an idiot. T

Until you write Fahrenheit 451, I wouldn't be so quick to call Ray Bradbury an idiot, no matter what he says about the internet. Or, are you starting out with the Martian Chronicle instead?

If anything, given the level of thought that the man has historically produced, you might find it instructive to understand what his criticisms are. If anything, it would only serve to improve the internet.

Re:Hmmm..

[Spy der Mann]

Farenheit 451 required a visionary. But I think that Bradbury simply lost his vision. It's not about the books. It's about the minds BEHIND the books.

What to say about sites like fictionpress.net? What about webcomics with a deep story? What about Anime music videos?

The internet is a primordial soup for art and culture. It doesn't matter if it's in the air, or the tubes, or whatever. People communicate with the internet. If the internet is a waste of time, that's because WE have turned it into a waste of time (mostly because media cartels are enforcing so many copyright policies that the internet is being stripped away from creativity world wide).

Oh, and by the way... by the way... I wonder what Bradbury would think of his books being available on thepiratebay.

http://thepiratebay.org/search/ray+bradbury/0/99/0

Not real anymore? Ray, I used to admire you, but you're losing touch with reality.

Re:Hmmm..

[spire3661]

Anyone so quick to dismiss the greatest communication tool man has yet devised as nothing but 'air' deserves harsh criticism, regardless of past accomplishments.

Re:Hmmm..

[Dr. Impossible]

Not to mention how sad it is for a science fiction writer to not understand the importance of the Internet.

Re:Hmmm..

[mellon]

The internet is indeed a great gestational pool for new work. It's also a huge distraction, and a difficult place to concentrate. And once the new work is done, it's a dangerous place for it to live, both because it might be vandalized, and because the place where it is stored might go away. Sure, if everybody makes a copy it might work out, but people only copy what's popular and what's known. A system that depends on repeated copying over millennia to preserve a work for millennia is very vulnerable. Can you imagine getting something like the dead sea scrolls off of a two-thousand-year-old hard drive?

Re:Hmmm..

[HiThere]

But the thing is, the internet is censorable from a central location. (Well, several central locations, actually, but the point stands.)

Remember what W. Smith's job was in 1984? Now it's not necessarily. The information can be altered in situ without anyone having any awareness of it. Web pages are a re-writable medium, so you can't tell what's been censored, and what's just been updated. The fact that it isn't the same today as yesterday doesn't prove anything. And the wayback machine is no protection. They'll remove things on request.

That's a part of the message that *I* took away from Fahrenheit 451.

How real is the knowledge in your head?

[Weedhopper]

Or is that in the air as well?

Ray Bradbury wrote some good books. One book in particular was truly great, providing a social commentary on the value of information and what it means to have open and free access. This makes him a man who was forward thinking for his time and perhaps means future societies will remember him.

Unfortunately, he's become a bit of a cranky old man. That's okay. I suppose he's earned the right to be one.

The value of his works shouldn't be diminished but certainly, time has passed him by.

Particularly ironic considering the events of the past week in Iran and the internet's enabling role in that continuing saga.

Re:I wouldn't be so quick to that.

[spire3661]

Just wanted to add that while the signal to noise ratio my be high, the signal is so incredibly strong that the noise is easy to filter out.

I could break down your arguments by saying things like, "Why rely solely on a book? If so inclined I could probably contact a few reputable PERL devs online and get real feedback and samples."

Books are great and have their place, but they pale very quickly when compared to the possibilities the internet offers.

Re:Internet

[hessian]

I mean, come on -- if the guy actually believes what he wrote in F. 451, then how does this NOT make sense for him to believe?

The point of Fahrenheit 451, like the point of Brave New World before it, is that people choose an easy lie over complicated truth. They prefer their entertainment and their illusions.

When I look at the internet, I see a lot of illusions, but very little that approaches the factual power of a good book. And I am a content publisher who has made the choice to put future writings into books, because I see how the internet has been progressively turning into television since 1996.

I will still love those resources, including Slashdot, which are useful. But I'll pick a real encyclopedia over Wikipedia, ignore those forums and blogs, and pick up a quality textbook for factual information.