Rhetoric in Practice Essay: “Panopticon 2084”, Essay Example

In the book 1984 George Orwell uses a variety of rhetorical techniques to get his point across to his audience. One of the techniques he uses is the make the world of Oceania as detailed and realistic as possible. In dystopian stories the future world is usually very bleak and depressing, like the events of the story are set at a time after some war or other disaster has occurred. There are some stories that are exceptions to this, of course. Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is set in a future where technology is common, and where the setting is not full of destruction and the aftermath of war. But it is still a dystopian future, because of the way that the people in the future are enslaved by technology and trapped in social roles that keep them from being free. Either of these approaches can work for telling a story of a dystopian future, but Orwell’s worked very well for his audience because 1984 was published just after World War II. The destruction of the war was still seen all over England and Europe, and the Soviet Union was growing in power, which made “Big Brother” seem like a real possibility to Orwell’s audience. In many ways Orwell was wrong about the way the future would look, and how the government would operate to restrict freedom and privacy. But there are also many things that Orwell got right, and comparing things from the book to things that actually exist today can help demonstrate that the details do not matter as much as the results where government power is concerned. In this paper I will discuss some of my ideas about 1984 and how they influenced my RIP project.

One of the main themes in 1984 is that government power can easily grow out of control and completely destroy the privacy and freedom of ordinary citizens. In fact that main method that the government of Big Brother uses to control the population and eliminate freedom is to eliminate all privacy. From the point of view of the main character, Winston Smith, there are only four different types of people. There are people like him, who are regular members of The Party. There are the proles, who are the poor and uneducated people who The Party does not seem to worry about very much. There are people like O’Brien, who are members of the Inner Party. And then there are the enemies of Oceania, like Goldberg, or the people of Eurasia, Eastasia, or whatever country Oceania happens to be at war with depending on what the Party says. The book focuses mainly on Winston Smith and his life as a member of the Party. For Smith and everyone else he knows, there is no freedom because there is no privacy. There are no laws against anything in particular, because doing anything other than what he is supposed to do is a crime, and it is impossible to do anything other than what he is supposed to do without being observed.

Actually there is one crime in Oceania, and that is “thoughtcrime.” Just the act of thinking about doing something wrong is a crime. In one scene Smith passes a fellow worker at the Ministry of Truth and notices that the other man has a nervous facial tic. When Winston sees that it is no different than of he had seen the man commit murder or rob someone. He knows as soon as he sees it that the man will eventually be taken away by the Thought Police and will probably disappear. The thing that makes this idea so terrifying to readers is that Orwell makes it seem so realistic. The government is not using some advanced technology to read people’s minds, even though Orwell could have used his imagination to invent some futuristic mind-reading device if he chose to do so. Instead the government uses technology that was really not much more advanced than what was available in Orwell’s time. What is different is how they use it. Because everyone knows they might be watched, they do everything they can to show the world around them how well they are conforming to the expectations of Big Brother. Even the tiniest little slip, like a nervous tic, gives the government a way to read their thoughts.

Big Brother’s government also controls the population by literally making it difficult to think any thoughts or have any ideas that do not conform to the expectations of the Party. The Party issues newspapers and other literature in “Newspeak,” which is really just a simplified version of English with fewer words. The Party issues a new Newspeak dictionary on a regular basis, and in each version the words are shorter and simpler. The people of Oceania have no way to even think about things like revolution or liberty because there are no words to express those ideas. When the government uses slogans like “Freedom is Slavery” or “Ignorance is Strength” they are actually destroying the true meanings of those word and ideas. There is an entire branch of the government called the Ministry of Truth that is responsible for creating all the lies that are told to the people of Oceania.

A third theme in 1984 is the way that governments use war and nationalism to unite the people of Oceania. In the future world of 1984 the country of Oceania is always at war with some other country. Winston Smith is not in the military and he does not seem to actually know anyone who is in the military. The only things he knows about the war are the things he sees on the telescreen or the news stories he is expected to write at his job at the Ministry of truth. The Party puts out news stories every day about how the war is almost won and how victory is close, but the truth is the war never ends. The Party also has an enemy, Goldberg, who betrayed Big Brother and who wants to destroy Oceania. Just like thw never-ending war, or the existence of Big Brother, Goldberg might not exist at all. And even if he ever did or still does, there is no way to know the truth about him. That is the ultimate point of 1984: that a government with too much power can control the truth by destroying anything that contradicts the government.

Part Two

In my rhetorical analysis I wrote about some of these same ideas, but I focused mostly on how Orwell was completely wrong about how hard the government would have to work to destroy everyone’s privacy. Orwell seemed to believe that people valued their liberty and privacy so greatly that they would never give it up without a fight, and that the government would have to use total power and control of everyone’s lives to take away their privacy. For my rhetorical project, though, I started by looking at Orwell’s approach from the opposite perspective. Instead of thinking about what Orwell got wrong, I started thinking about what Orwell got right. For example, he predicted that in the future there would be screens everywhere that could be used for two-way communication. For example, news reports play on Winston’s telescreen while he sits in his apartment, and when he does not keep up with the exercise program in the morning, a voice calls out to him through the screen, yelling at him to keep up. The following passage from the first chapter of the book sums up the nature of the Big Brother surveillance state in 1984:

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. 

The idea of a system of control that can monitor people at any time or all the time was not new when Orwell wrote 1984. In the 1700s a man named Jeremy Bentham wrote about his idea for a prison design where the guards could watch the prisoners from a central tower surrounded by cells. The prisoners could not see when the guards were watching them, so they never knew for sure if they were being watched. The prisoners could only see the other cells across from them. The idea of the Panopticon was that the prisoners would have to assume that they were always being watched by the guards or even by other prisoners who might report on them to the guards if they did anything wrong. In his book “Discipline and Punish” philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault writes about the Panopticon concept, and discusses the history of prisons and the ways that governments control populations (Foucault, 1977). Many of the ideas Foucault discusses in his book reflect ideas Orwell writes about in 1984, and the government of Big Brother uses technology to operate like a virtual Panopticon.

Part Three

My RIP project ideas are based on some of the main themes in 1984, specifically in the things that Orwell got right. Even if the U.S. government does not enforce such rigid conformity on the population, the technology of the Internet can be used to monitor the private lives of pretty much anyone the government chooses. My target audience for this project is the same group of people who are in this class. Young people who have lived all of their adult lives and many years of their childhood with the Internet and cell phones do not have any real idea of what the world was like before this technology was so common. People from older demographics can see the world in terms of “Before the Internet” and “After the Internet,” but for younger people there is no before and after. This is like the world Winston Smith lives in, where he only has a few hazy memories of life before Big Brother, and he is not even sure if his memories are accurate.

My RIP project is based on a fictional book called “Panopticon 2084.” It is a combination of a book summary and a book review on “Panopticon 2084.”  In the future world of 2084, the government will be able to monitor the details of everyone’s lives, down to their location at every moment, and even their heart rate and blood pressure. The reality is that such a thing is possible today. Cell phones and smart watched that contain personal information and even health data can easily be hacked. (Bradley, 2013).  The basic premise of “Panopticon 2084” is that the whole country is like a prison, and the government watches everyone all the time. Every main element in the story will actually be based on something from the real world of 2014, but exaggerated just a little. The point of Panopticon 2014 will be to show just how much of Orwell’s’ predictions of the future have already come true, and how we do not even notice most of it.

Reading this draft reminds me of just how far off I was when I first started working on this project, and how far I came as I continued to work on it. In this draft I mainly discussed some of the themes from 1984, and the discussed how I wanted to write about similar themes in a contemporary setting. My final project ended up looking nothing like what I was writing about here.

Despite the shortcomings of this draft, it does reinforce how important it is to conduct writing workouts and pre-writing exercises, as well as post-writing reflection and rewriting. With each stage of the proposal process, I came up with at least a few ideas that put me closer to where I should be. If I had not undertaken all the different stages of the writing process we explored in this course I would not have been able to write my final RIP project. Each step in the writing and rewriting process allowed make to at least explore ideas on paper, instead of just thinking about them with no particular emphasis or organized approach. By the time I got to the final RIP project I had kept some of the important ideas I wanted to explore in terms of rhetoric and gotten rid of the elements of analysis of Orwell that were completely out of place.

Works cited

Bradley, Tony. ‘Study Finds Most Mobile Apps Put Your Security And Privacy At Risk’. PCWorld. N. p., 2014. Web. 15 Aug. 2014.

Dean, Mike, and George Orwell. 1984. 1st ed. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2003. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline And Punish. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Print.