Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, was a science fiction writer who produced his most famous works in the 1950s.  What makes him most significant was his ability to predict the effect that (as yet uninvented) modern technology would have on human society.  

As Tim Kreider says in an opinion editorial for The New York Times called "Uncle Ray's Dystopia," Bradbury saw that modern communications technology would come with a price of its own:  "Mr. Bradbury didn’t just extrapolate the evolution of gadgetry; he foresaw how it would stunt and deform our psyches."
In a short story called "The Murderer," Bradbury produced a "vision of 'tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, ‘Now I’m at Forty-third, now I’m at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first' has gone from science-fiction satire to dreary realism."

Bradbury envisioned a society whose people lost their ability to read because of the nature of their electronic devices.  It's not too hard to imagine a time in the future where our devices can beam ideas directly into our mind.  Will we lose reading then?  And will it matter to us?