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Technology Drifts People Apart

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Technology Drifts People Apart
Technology Drifts People Apart
Technology is evolving more and more each day. Machines are incorporated more and more into daily life, until there is next to nothing we do on our own. Technology can begin to replace the important people in our lives too. In “The Veldt” Ray Bradbury uses conflict to show us that technology can alienate people from one another. Bradbury uses conflict to illustrate the fact that technology can cause people loosen the bonds we hold with other people.
The conflict in the story shows us what technology can do to the bonds we hold with other people. In the story, George and Lydia’s children, Peter and Wendy, are pampered by technology and luxury, particularly their nursery. This nursery slowly begins to replace George and Lydia in the children’s eyes. The room becomes “their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents” (9). The children’s affections, once placed in their real mother and father, have shifted to their beloved nursery which began to assume the mother and father in place of George and Lydia. The advanced technology in the nursery begins to eradicate the need for Paul and Wendy to place their affections in their parents; instead they place them in their much loved nursery. Luxury and machinery slowly drive the family apart. The children “live for the nursery” (3). They become engrossed in their luxury way of living and want only to “look and listen and smell” (7), everything else is to be done by machines. This implies that they no longer need their parents in their lives and that to them, they are obsolete. Just like in people, they look to technology and gadgets to make life simple and easy and carefree. The role their parents play in their lives slowly diminishes and the bond parents and child share fades into nothingness. The children’s world revolves around technology, it is “built… around creature comforts” (9). They rely solely on technology, no longer on their parents and in fact

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