THE OTHER NIGHT, I watched Francis Truffaut’s 1966 film Fahrenheit 451. Based on the Ray Bradbury novel, it tells of a dystopian future, where black-clad, jack-booted firemen, responding to clanging alarms, race to people’s generally fireproof homes.

Once there, they search for printed materials — all banned by the government because they give people “thoughts” that fill them with questions and make them unhappy. The firemen find books hidden in a lamp, or behind a TV screen, or snapped down in an automatic toaster. Then, they stack them in a pile, turn a flame thrower on them, and burn them all to gray ashes.

Get it? Firemen?

I adored that film when I was a kid, maybe because it taught ideas that have always resonated with me — that a government which wants to do everything for us is often up to no good, and that it’s important for people to think and act for themselves.

The movie depicts a culture of instant gratification, where pill-popping citizens, diverted by pointless celebrity news and an Oprah-like TV goddess who tells them what to think, are incapable of serious thoughts that require lengthy attention spans.

In its best moments, the film is a lovely homage to books. Director Truffaut tosses many of my favorites onto the fire — Moby Dick, Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Don Quixote, Pride and Prejudice, 1984, Bradbury’s own Martian Chronicles and scores more. The flames lick and caress them, tearing through the title pages, riffling the leaves, erasing beauty and intelligence.

Still, the film’s vision of the future looks rather silly these 40 years later. For one thing, there’s too much leisure time, walking and public transportation in it! And though giant, flat, wall-mounted TV screens have come to life in our age of plasma high-definition sets, the government requires no squads of Men in Black to keep a stupid and “happy” citizenry from reading books and newspapers.

We’re doing it ourselves.

The love of print on paper — the magic many of us felt in holding, touching, smelling books, and then reading, disappearing into a world of imagination, or learning about the past, or sounding out beautiful phrases, or meeting some of the smartest and most interesting humans who ever lived — seems to be vanishing right before our eyes.

Computers are providing our information now — in little snippets that, because of human neurology, fail to convey information the way the printed word does.

The brains of homo-sapiens react to pulped wood differently than to electronic light. A computer is great at giving us segments of sorted information at a quick speed. But reading print requires a special form of thinking, an ability to focus for long periods of time, to retain information, to pause and reflect. Print can be underscored with a finger, marked up with a pencil, carried easily under a tree or into a nook. I think that’s why even today’s college students print out computer material onto good old-fashioned paper.

In a column that appeared in The Washington Post on Jan. 21, school librarian Thomas Washington noted that great literary works are merely gathering dust in his stacks. Rather than promoting a love of books, librarians have become media and information specialists who help students engage in “data-mining,” retrieving isolated facts from Web sites and publications. Books are often checked out and returned a day later, unread, after an excerpt or two has been culled to meet a requirement for multiple sources.

Libraries are now pushing DVDs and best-sellers, anything that “moves.” In Virginia’s Fairfax County, the library is planning to strip the shelves of books that have not been checked out in two years — books like To Kill A Mockingbird and For Whom The Bell Tolls. That is just too bad for those simpletons, like me, who discovered great books by finding them on a shelf, not because I already knew I wanted them.

But who will want them? A 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts found literary reading sharply declining, especially among young adults 18 to 24.

This anti-print trend, naturally, sends tremors of terror through my industry. Newspaper circulation is in decline as older readers die. Many young people can’t be bothered. In the early 1970s, 70 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds read a daily newspaper. Today, the figure is 35 percent, and falling.

That’s a disaster for journalists, but it’s an even bigger disaster for our society. Printed papers offer something of incalculable value: context. It is easier to see how important something is by its placement on a page, something even a newspaper Web site cannot easily duplicate. Often, by means of turning a page, I stumble onto an important story about some topic I might never have clicked onto, or “called up” on a Web site’s search engine.

The elites will continue to read print, including history and fiction, because intelligence often translates to power and money. Books will survive, as will specialty periodicals. But, if our culture continues in its rapid flight from print to digitized information, many citizens will lose the ability to ponder seriously, to vote intelligently, or to understand the world around them.

Many in government would like that just fine. And just think: It can be done without the messy drama of burning anything!

Edward Achorn is The Journal’s deputy editorial-pages editor ( eachorn@projo.com).