Research Information System
5th INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ANGLO-AMERICAN CULTURE AND LITERATURE, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 25 - 29 March 2026, pp.1-2, (Summary Text)
The Veldt is a short story by American author Ray Bradbury, about a tragic tale of the automated
house and the nursery which takes roles of parents, published in 1950. Unlike many other
science fiction writers, Bradbury is an influential writer who can portray his futuristic fears as
a visionary of digital age through his past. His fear is not for technology but how people use it.
He tells the anxiety of losing human emotions, because he thinks that when we allow machines
to raise our children, we are not make a better life for them, we make a new digital generation
who do not recognize their family ties. Especially written with an anti technological perpective,
Bradbury’s works are known for exploring the tension between human and digital world, loss
of humanity and over reliance on technology. Bradbury focuses on how children can be isolated
from both parents and society by exposing the violent images of African veldt in this story the
Veldt. In this dystopian fiction, it is possible to observe Bradbury’s anxieties regarding a future
where technology replaces human labor. This story serves as a warning to parents who fulfill
every wish of their children. Parents who want to provide their children with a better life through
smart homes are actually destroying their human emotions. Digital screens not only cause
children to become emotionally alienated from their parents, but also leave them with a
meaningless, boring, and virtual life. Bradbury does not only write about a violence room, he
also reflects a digital panopticon, as theorized by Michel Foucoult, that controls everything
related to humans. The Veldt highlights that this system watches us, knows our needs before us
and offers a comfort life, in real, creates a digital prison. The aim of this study is to reveal how
new generation is raised by digital screens instead of parents and the tragic consequences of
technological parenting on the children through the The Veldt, in the frame of Panopticon theory.