What Orwell Got Wrong: Power and Control in 1984, Essay Example

In the novel 1984 author George Orwell presents a dark and terrifying portrayal of the future. It is a word where the government has total control over the lives of every citizen, and even thinking the wrong thoughts can cause someone to be arrested and made to disappear. The government is ruled by a character named Big Brother, but it is never clear fro the story whether Big Brother is a real person. Even if he does not really exist, Big Brother and his slogan “Big Brother is watching you!” is a symbol for the way that the government monitors every moment of everyone’s life. The people who live in Oceania, where the story takes place, are so terrified of being accused of thoughtcrime that they spy on each other and turn each other in to the Thought Police for even the smallest of crimes. The system of government is set up so that no one knows at any one moment if they are being watched, so everyone behaves as if they are always being watched. One of the main ways that the government controls the lives of the people is through the use of technology. If someone looks at the technology of today, it seems like many of the things that Orwell predicted have come true. Orwell did make one big mistake, however, when he created a world where the people had to be forced to submit to being spied on and monitored. In our real modern world, people do not have to be forced into having technology in their lives. Instead they choose to use technology even though they know it can be used against them. What Orwell got wrong was just how easy it has been for governments around the world to watch their citizens.

The government of Big Brother uses two main forms of technology to control the people of Oceania. The first one, and maybe the most impart one, is the telescreen. In the first few pages of 1984 we meet Winston Smith, who is the main character in the story. There is nothing special about Smith, which is the point of the story. He is just one of thousands of members of The Party, and he works in the Ministry of Truth, which is propaganda department of the government. At the beginning of the story, Smith is arriving home to his flat, which is a dingy, grey room with worn out furniture, poor plumbing, and a heating system that barely works. It is clear right away that Smith is just like everyone else who lives the same way. His neighbors all have top deal with how broken and ruined everything is, and everyone seems miserable, even though they try to hide their true feelings.

The reason they hide these feelings is because of the telescreen. In Smith’s apartment the telescreen is like a big dull mirror, but it shows images of news reports, exercise programs, and other shows the part approves. The problem with the telescreen is that it can never be turned off. Smith can turn the volume down a bit, but the voices coming from the telescreen are always there, reminding him that he and everyone else are always at risk of being watched:

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. – George Orwell, 1984

That is what makes the world of 1984 so terrifying for Orwell’s’ readers. At the time he wrote the book, technology like the telescreen did not really exist, and it definitely did not exist in the way that it did in the book, where screens were everywhere, always broadcasting. For Orwell and for readers in the middle of the 20^th century, technology was evolving very quickly, and it symbolized both positive and negative aspects. It was possible that technology was going to make everyone’s lives better, but it was also possible that it was going to make everyone’s lives much worse. It had only been a few years since the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War I, so the idea that technology could bring about the end opf the world was something that people in that time believed very seriously. The central element that mad the telescreen so terrifying to Smith was the fact that it could be watching him at any moment, and he never knew if it was. Smith had to live his life like he was always being watched, which is like being in a prison that looked like a city. In the future Orwell created, technology was everywhere all the time, and that was clearly not something Orwell thought was a good idea.

The nature of the telescreen is quite similar to the idea of the Panopticon. The Panopticon was an idea for a prison that was created in the 19^th century, but was never actually used in the full and complete form. The basic idea for the Panopticon prison was that a central tower was surrounded by a circular wall that contained hundreds of jail cells. The central tower was designed so that the guards inside it could look out in all directions and see every single cell, but the prisoners inside the cells could not see into the tower. Because the guards were invisible to the prisoners, the prisoners never knew of they were being watched, but they knew that they might be watched at any time. Even though they never knew for sure if they were being watched, they would be forced to behave like they were always being watched. This made the idea of the Panopticon a simple way for a small number of people to control a large number of people.

Even though no real Panopticon prison was ever built, some of the ideas in the basic design have been incorporated into other prison designs. What makes it relevant to 1984 is that the telescreen is like the tower in the Panopticon prison, and the people of Oceania are like the prisoners. The physical layout of Oceania is not the same as the Panopticon, of course, but the basic idea that a small number of people (in the book, this is the Inner Party) can watch over and control a large number of people, is exactly the same. Just like in the Panopticon, the people of Oceania do not need to see that someone is watching them to make them behave as if they are being watched. It just becomes a part of daily life to live that way. Orwell was concerned about the sort of brutal totalitarianism exemplified by the governments of Nazi Germany and of Eastern Europe after WWII. He used the Panopticon-type government to show how a government could grow so powerful that they could control the lives of every single person.

In addition to the telescreen, the government of Big Brother used one other primary form of technology to control the citizens of Oceania. Smith’s job was to work at The Ministry of Truth (or Miniature) to report whatever news the government told him to report. To do this job, Smith was also responsible for making information disappear if the government decided it was no longer good or helpful for them. If the government wanted to change something in a newspaper or a history book, it was up to Smith and the other party members in Minitrue to take the information and send it down the Memory Hole.  Smith had no idea what happened after he sent papers into the Memory Hole, he just knew that the information was gone, and that the government had the power to rewrite history:

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs–to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance…In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place – George Orwell, 1984

There are many other elements in the book that can be compared to technology we use today, but the combination of the telescreen and the Memory Hole is, in many ways, very much like our modern Internet. As the people of the U.S. and the rest of the world learned from former NSA employee Edward Snowden, the U.S. government is able to use the information passed around on the Internet to monitor and spy on just about anyone. After 9/11 the Patriot Act made it easier for the government to spy on people, but this power was supposed to be used only on people who were suspected of criminal or terrorist activity. When Snowden made his revelations about the NSA, it became clear that the NSA was abusing their power, and that the extent of government spying was much larger than the people of America had realized. Even though these secrets were revealed, it does not seem as if anything has changed. The Internet is like a Panopticon, and it can be used to watch people without them knowing it. The Internet has also affected the way many people find information. Virtually anyone can post anything they like on the Internet, which makes it harder and harder to tell the truth from fiction. Instead of making information disappear, there is just so much information on the Internet that the truth sometimes seems to disappear.  By ignoring this, the Internet can be used like a modern day Memory Hole, where anyone with enough power and access can control the truth and rewrite history.

The one thing that Orwell got completely wrong was that people have not been coerced into using the modern day telescreen and Memory Hole. Instead of the government forcing people to have screens and other devices set up in their homes, people are happy to pay money for the privilege of having these devices. Everywhere you look today there are flatscreen televisions with enormous screens, and billions of people are walking around with smart phones and tablets to stay connected to the Internet at every moment. Even though the whole world knows about the NSA, and can guess that every government is doing the same thing, people still share private data about their lives on the Internet. It has become such a part of everyday life that many people could not stop using it even if they wanted to. And it is not just governments that can monitor, it is also companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and any other company that handles personal and private data. Orwell warned that government might try to force people to give up this level of privacy. What Orwell got wrong is that people have not been forced to do this. Instead of coercing people to stay connected to the modern day telescreen, the powerful governments and private corporations just had to make it fun and distracting, and billions of people around the world would hand their lives over to Big Brother.

After reading comments I received in response to this project, and after having more time to think about it and reflect on what I wrote, I have come to realize that I did not accomplish what I was supposed to accomplish with this project. At the same time, though, my process and pre-writing for this project did give me a chance to think about Orwell’s book more extensively than I had before. One of the things I considered about Orwell was that he used technology as a central part of the way that the government of Big Brother controlled the population. When addressing his audience, Orwell created fictional technologies that were not so far advanced from things that already existed at the time, and I looked at this as part of his rhetorical approach. I still think that if I could have found a way to express myself more clearly and effectively about my thoughts on this, I may have created a better paper. One of the notable criticisms I received is that I spent too much effort on summarizing elements of the book, which I can see is a fair criticism. It was my effort to explain and analyze Orwell’s rhetoric, but I can see that I spent too much time on describing elements of the book and not enough on explaining how I thought these elements reflected Orwell’s rhetoric.

Works cited

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