Fahrenheit 451

Beatty tells Montag that the society they live in came to be because people wanted things to be simpler and faster. They didn't want to take the time to read an entire book or an entire newspaper even. They wanted to know just what was necessary for them and then move on. Consequently, books became condensed to the point of simply being a sentence describing the plot. Along with the boring blandness that came with condensing books came the push to "cleanse" books of all material not deemed politically correct. That cleansing, done for the sake of keeping people happy and free from upset, made books very boring. Beatty explains that these two trends - desire for speed of information along with the white-washing of information - created the dictate that books were bad and they were needless.