Orwell's Surprise - Are We Big Brother?

When your name becomes an adjective, you know you have made an impact on the world. The word Orwellian, describes a society bound to the shackles of governmental misinformation.

Wars are falsified, the enemy of yesterday is the friend of today, and the friend the enemy. Plain speaking has been swapped for doublespeak and newspeak. Confusion is the prime mover in a society that is wrought with secrecy and treachery alike.

George Orwell painted a grim picture in his 1930s book Nineteen Eighty Four.

By the time 1984 actually came around, perhaps some could say that we were indeed heading for the dystopian nightmare portrayed in Orwell's masterpiece. We had a situation whereby our media was being controlled by a small group of people, and we were still in the grips of the Cold War.

However that was before the internet . . .

A Gambit For Orwell

I have always been fascinated about certain tools we humans invent, that at once becomes our panacea and our poison.

The internet was the ultimate cure to the Orwellian society. You see, Orwell saw that the key factor when considering the mass control of the populace, was to control the news that people received.

By controlling the media you can literally tell people what to think, about whoever, whatever, and however.

Then came the thing that Orwell didn't see coming, a world wide web of information flowing through an internet of computer servers, accessible to all.

Surely the internet is the panacea to the poison of Orwell's society, with the web, no longer was the dissemination of general news and information in the hands of the so very few.

The Cure Is The Disease

It turns out though, that the very thing that has allowed us to break free from the prison of partisan news coverage, in now in danger of becoming a conduit for the insidious, society-rotting poison that Orwell so warned us about.

This is because getting your news from the internet, is like trying to take a drink from a fire hydrant. We are creating petabytes of information everyday, gushing out faster than the speed of thought.

With this comes confusion, the key component in the Orwellian society. However this time there is no they, this time the they, is us.

It may be easy to offer a riposte to this argument by saying things along the lines of; big corporations still run the media, and governments still lie, etc. etc.

However they are no longer in control, a politician wanting to cover up a story in the past, may well have (and might still do) get a super injunction, basically a great big legal club to beat the mainstream media with. Stopping them printing the story, for fear of getting sued into the next century, and possibly imprisoned too.

Super injunctions simply do not work on a random person on Twitter who witnesses an event, photograph's it, shares it, and then watch it go viral.

User generated content isn't just about entertainment, it's about our news too.

You know a genre is taking over, when the previous genre starts to refer to it.

I'm sure you've watched news items on TV whereby they talk about what somebody said on Twitter; right?

So in other words; if we are the ones creating most of the news, then we are the ones creating most of the confusion; which then begs the question;

Are We Big Brother?

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Fake Newspeak

Orwell described newspeak as a language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary. A linguistic design, meant to limit the freedom of thought, personal identity, self-expression, and free will that ideologically threatens the regime of Big Brother.

Maybe that description above describes the extreme left Social Justice Warrior, who attempts to restrict use of certain words and terms for fear of causing offence?

Or perhaps it is the extreme right Alt Right Crusader who tries to restrict the use of certain terms that spread an ideology that threatens a perceived status quo?

Perhaps it is both, and the rest of us combined, maybe Orwell was wrong, it isn't they who will destroy our wills through subjugation.

We have created a world of Post Truth, one where we are the arbiters of our own confusion. It is the very information that we so willingly share and propagate that will bring us down.

Is this the last irony of Big Brother; that his dystopian vision is no longer needed; that we have become the arbiters of our own confusion, he can finally rest easy leaving the downfall of society in our very own more than capable hands?

WHAT DO YOU THINK? IS THE ORWELLIAN NIGHTMARE COMING TRUE, AND IS IT OF OUR OWN DOING? IF SO, WHAT IS THE SOLUTION, WHERE WILL IT END?

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