Many of you may recognize this scene from Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story “The Veldt”. It’s a story in which the Hadley family provide the children Wendy and Peter with unlimited access to technology. Wendy and Peter’s nursery has the capability of becoming anything that they want it to be, and their obsession with this virtual world eventually leads them to lead their own parents to their vicious deaths to hungry lions. This is one of my favorite stories to discuss in my literature classes because I feel like almost everyone, regardless of age or whether or not they are a parent, can relate to this in today’s post-digital world.
With every passing year, our dependence on technology grows in leaps and bounds. I worry sometimes if my own children are going to become like Wendy and Peter in this story. Are they going to one day feed me to the hungry lions if I try to take away their devices?
In Justin Hodgson’s Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic, he asserts that the spread of technology through smart devices, digital media, and network technologies has increased our experiences of everyday things on and through the screen. In fact, we have become so saturated with technology that many people have even adopted digitally-attuned sensibilities. I can definitely see this with people I am surrounded with, especially my children and my students.
Although Bradbury wrote “The Veldt” seventy years ago, I can certainly understand his warning to us, but I can also see the benefits to our new post-digital world. We have the capabilities to produce and shape arguments in more ways than just the written or spoken word. We have access to any information we could possibly need at the touch of a button. In addition, we can also communicate with anyone anywhere in the world whenever we want. The boundaries, as Hodgson suggests, between the real world and the digital world have become blurred, and technology has fundamentally reconfigured how we make sense of our world.
Hodgson quotes Walter Ong who states that “Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it” (23). In my opinion, I really believe that Ong is correct. Our lives have been enhanced by technology in many more ways than one. Bradbury suggests that a dependence on a virtual world may lead to a lack of empathy and concern for others, but in many ways, I truly believe that today’s children are more empathetic and caring now than they were when I was a kid. This may not be true for everyone, but it has certainly been my observation.
So maybe I won’t get fed to the lions, after all. Maybe, just maybe, our post-digital world will only make us better.
Works Cited
Bradbury, Ray. “The Veldt”. The Saturday Evening Post. 1950.
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Hodgson, Justin. Post Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic. The Ohio State University Press. Columbus. 2019. PDF.
Raynie. “Digital Rain”. Epidemic Sound.
“The Veldt”. The Ray Bradbury Theater. S04E11. Aired 10 November 1989. YouTube.
Video and Photography by Heather Hartness and Pexels.com.
