Do you think that the World is turning out just like George Orwell's book - 1984

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  1. Tony the writer profile image64
    Tony the writerposted 12 years ago

    Do you think that the World is turning out just like George Orwell's book - 1984?

  2. MickS profile image60
    MickSposted 12 years ago

    It was like Orwell's book long before 1984, he was able to write it based upon events of the time, he just used his imagination to tart things up a bit.

  3. gposchman profile image60
    gposchmanposted 12 years ago

    First of all remember 1984 was published in 1949 about a futuristic world in a date that is fast becoming a year in ancient history.  The nightmare world that Orwell created was a venue for his cautionary warning about the current world he was living in.  Although the technology was not completely in place in the forties, it was visually on the horizon and could easily be imagined.

    The real nightmare was a totalitarian regime that pitted its citizens against one another as a means to control society.  World War 2 had just ended and although Nazi Germany was becoming a bad dream, the USSR was becoming a world power that utilized many of the elements in Orwell's 1984.

    This is not about the future, it is about people not keeping a watchful eye on those they put into power and being wary of false promises and political slight of hand oriented at taking away rights in the name of security and nationalism.

  4. cperuzzi profile image89
    cperuzziposted 12 years ago

    Unfortunately, yes.

    With the advent of the cellphone backed by the power and availability of the internet, every person who steps into a modern metropolis - let alone a shopping mall - is subject to monitoring.  When combined with the decline of personal privacy and the intrusion of corporations into social media, we can say that Big Brother is certainly here.

    Okay, let me take my tin foil hat off.  And give you a real life example.  What happens when an individual applies for a job?  The screening process includes a drug and alcohol test, a criminal background check, a credit check,  monitoring of the applicant's social media accounts, and a search through Google to find anything that everything else has missed.  As nothing really disappears from the internet, anything connected to the applicant's name is subject to scrutiny regardless of the publication date.

    Or how about we talk about the concept of newspeak?  This was Orwell's concept of re engineering language to minimize the bad and exemplify the correct.  For example, the word "bad" was "ungood" with the modifier of a "plus" or "double-plus".  Therefore something catastrophically terrible would be a "double plus ungood" thing.  By the time the human mind deciphers the meaning the emotional resonance is gone.

    I thought about this during the Bush Administration and the coverage of the Iraq War. When the government was sure that there were missiles in Iraq, they were called "Weapons of Mass Destruction".  As it was discovered that they really didn't exist, they became "WMD's".  This is a systematic desensitization similar to newspeak.

    Is 1984 here?  All you have to do is watch the media.

 
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