New RIP Proposal, Essay Example

This project is very challenging for me, because it requires me to use skills I have not completely mastered, and I am also writing in a non-native language. I have reviewed the comments about my RIP proposal and how I am using the same ideas from my RA paper. That was my mistake for not being clear enough, and also for using some of my RIP ideas in the RA paper that I should not have included in that project. Hopefully I learned from those mistakes, and the RIP project I have in mind will focus on a different set of ideas. At the first glance it may seem like it is the same ideas, but I really had two main thoughts about 1984 and how it is relevant to audiences today. The first idea is that Orwell got some things wrong, most significantly in terms of how he created a world where the government had to use total control to invade the private lives of ordinary people. The technology like the telescreen had to be forced on people. In the modern world, the government can monitor people because they willingly let it happen. That is one of the main ideas I considered in my RA. The other idea or response I had about 1984 is that Orwell got some things exactly right, and that is what I want to focus on in my RIP.

In a way it is like looking at the issue from two different perspectives. Orwell was writing 1984 at a time when the totalitarian government of the Soviet Union was gaining enormous power after World War II. When I read the description of Big Brother in 1984, I kept thinking of Josef Stalin. It sounded to me like Orwell was more or less using Big Brother as a symbol of the way Josef Stalin ruled over the Soviet Union, and imagining a world where the symbol of Stalin’s power would survive long after Stalin was dead. In 1984, the government’s main goal was to destroy any sense of privacy of the citizens so that they could control everything the people did. And from that point of view, I thought that Orwell might be surprised to know that sixty years later there would be billions of people who would give up their privacy willingly, so that the government would not have to force them to do it.

What I want to focus on in my RIP is the other side of the same issue. I want to examine all the things that Orwell got right. I would like to consider issues like the Patriot Act and the NSA and how the US government is gathering data on ordinary citizens. Orwell might be disappointed to find out how easily the government was able to invade the privacy of so many people, but I want to focus more on the issues related to how it happens today. In the simplest sense, I want to use my RIP to focus on what Orwell got right. I understand that there is some ways that this will overlap with the other project, but I would like to develop ideas I only touched on earlier.

For the audience I would choose to focus on an audience that has grown up with the Internet as a part of their daily lives. I would like to examine specific technologies like the Internet and cell phones and show parallels to specific parts of the book 1984. The surveillance state that exists in 1984 is in many ways like the real surveillance state of today, but for people that have never considered it, the world of 1984 might seem very different from the real world of 2014. I would like to base my project on a presentation that highlights elements from the story and compares them to real life situations from the modern world.