Thanks!ġ,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.Ĩ00 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo and Crypto. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. On the other hand in the short story, The Pedestrian by Ray Bradley, individuals are completely addicted to technology, allowing technology to over rule the world and take over people. If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Waugh author of the short story, Long Way Home tells a story about a caring father losing his son, due to the worlds advanced technology. Above you can hear the story read aloud by Daniel Shortland, as part of The Reading Project. It was also included in the collection The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953). Although we may have more technological distractions, this is evidence of the fact we reside in a dystopian, not a utopian universe, as depicted by Bradbury.“The Pedestrian,” a short story by Ray Bradbury, was originally published in the Augissue of The Reporter ( read it online here). But it is our connection to nature, stripped of technology, which is essential to our individuality, not the programs we watch on television-or the appearance of our cellphones.īradbury’s dystopian story provides a warning that is clearly not being heeded. We are losing the ability to amuse ourselves in the outside world. Our cellphones, cars, and computers define our identities, rather than our bodies. In the modern world, we are increasingly categorized by our technological devices. Today, there are even more varied sedentary distractions, spanning from the Internet, to mobile phones, to video games. From Bradbury’s perspective in time, the dangers of television were the greatest risk posed to enjoying hands-on, real world activities. Although Bradbury does not specifically discuss the physical risks of inactivity, the nation’s climbing obesity rate is clear evidence of the fact that Americans are moving less and instead turning to sedentary pastimes to unwind. For 10 years, Mead has walked the city streets alone, night after night, past homes of other citizens who sit transfixed by their televisions. This takes people away from nature and a sense of being part of something larger than themselves. Ray Bradbury’s short story The Pedestrian narrates the life of Leonard Mead, a resident of an unnamed city in the year 2053. Today, people do still walk, but often on a moving conveyor belt at the gym, rather in a real environment. Riding in a car is seen as more normal, just like a robotic policeman is seen as more normal in the Bradbury story. In many communities, walking ‘behavior’ does appear to be unusual, because it looks so uncommon, despite the natural physiological aspect of walking. Today, human beings are less able to walk around suburban developments and to reach destinations such as the grocery store and their work by foot or by bicycle. But when society as a collective deems what is normal and healthy to be ‘abnormal,’ normalcy is seen as pathological.Bradbury’s story seems unusually prescient. Human beings are physically built to be mobile, not to sit watching television all of the time. What value is there in normalcy if this consigns the individual to a fate of watching television all day and night? In theory, nothing should be as normal and pleasurable as taking a walk. The story also questions the concept of normalcy and the value of being normal. The atmosphere of the story conjures up a sterile, 1950s suburb where everything is perfect, manicured, plastic, and vacant-even of human beings.However, the absence of real, lived experience-the aspects of life that make human existence meaningful and enjoyable-suggests the story’s dystopian nature. All he sees inside are flickers of light, gray phantoms, or murmurs from open windows of tomb-like buildings. On the surface, this might seem to suggest that Bradbury’s story is utopian in nature, given the lack of crime and apparent peace enjoyed by the human community. On these nights, he’ll walk for hours, passing darkened houses, which is like walking through a graveyard.
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