The National Security Agency, Essay Example

I am still trying to figure out what sort of RIP project I would like to make. The main theme of my proposal is to examine the technology that the government of Big Brother uses to control the citizens of Oceania and compare/contrast that to the technology we use in the real world. Just this morning I read a news story about new leaks from someone inside the National Security Agency who describes how there are hundreds of thousands of people that the U.S> government has labeled “terrorists,” and many of them are U.S. citizens. The government is supposed to protect the citizens, but it also uses technology to spy on them,. The first thing I thought of when I read that story this morning is “Big Brother is Watching You!”

For my writing workouts this week I concentrated on two things: the first was making a new outline for my proposal. Right now I am proposing a presentation to young, educated college students who use technology in their daily lives, but I am still trying to narrow my focus. So I brainstormed a list of some of the main ideas and themes I want to include in the presentation, so that I can keep focusing on them and not end of including too many things. I wrote them down to see which ideas fro the book I would pair with things from the real world:

• Winston Smith’s apartment with the telescreen/modern apartment with a flat screen TV
• The Memory Hole/Internet
• NSA spying on citizens/The National Security Agency using the Internet and cell phones for spying
• The Ministry of Truth & Big Brother propaganda/U.S. government propaganda; NSA press releases; congressional hearings

The other area I focused on was rewriting my proposal based on the feedback I received. The first comment was that I needed to identify my target audience. In this case I decided my target audience would be my classmates. The next issue was choosing a medium. At first I chose a speech/presentation, but I am still not sure if that is the best way to go. I may end up changing that. Right now it seems logical because the ideas I have seem to be leading me that way, but I am going to brainstorm for ideas. Finally, what interests me about this is simply that we all use technology every day that can be used against us exactly like the technology in 1984, and we do it without even thinking about it.  Maybe my audience will think a bit before revealing too much personal information in the future.
This was one of the first times where I began to see the value in the writing workouts. That does not mean that I did not think such workouts were valuable from the beginning, it just means that when I first tried to do some of the specific workouts I did not really feel as if I got much out of doing it. I thought of it as “going through the motions.” But with this I decided to take some time with it. I began by writing down a list of ideas and topics I thought were important, and then moved things around on the list to try to decide how they fit together the best.

I then used that list to create an outline, and I began to see how putting ideas in a certain order could give me a sense of how the paper could be structured in a strong way. In hindsight I can see that the finished paper was not as good as it might have been, but this exercise was at least worthwhile because it helped me spend more time thinking about how I wanted to present my ideas and helped me decide which ideas I wanted to include and which I wanted to discard. In a sense, the writing workouts processes were some of the most valuable parts of this course, as I know I will spend much more time pre-writing and doing these kinds of writing workouts on any writing projects in the future.