by Joel L. Swerdlow

About the author: Joel L. Swerdlow is a senior writer for National Geographic.

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—which was written in the early 1950s, just after televisions and computers first appeared—people relate most intimately with electronic screens and don’t like to read. They are happy when firemen burn books.

Cram people “full of noncombustible data,” the fire captain explains. “Chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.”

The Information Revolution Is Here

Bradbury’s novel no longer seems set in a distant future. Thanks to growth in computer capacity, television and computers are...