1984

The start to George Orwell's novel 1984 has been very slow. Thus far, the book outlines the life of Winston Smith in the dystopian society of Oceania where everything and everyone is controlled by "Big Brother". The book is interesting to read in the 21st century because the book represents Orwell's projection of the world 34 years in the future, yet we are reading it as if it is 30 years in the past. Orwell has made eerily accurate predictions of what the world would be like although he is thirty years off. To start with, our world, like that of Oceania is dominated by screens. Winston's life is constantly monitored by a telescreen in his home which constantly watches him while feeding him information. In a similar sense, life today is dominated by screens whether it is a computer, cell phone, or a television screen it seems as though people are continuously connected to technology. Additionally, Orwell predicts the language of Newspeak which appears to be full of conjunctions and combining words. Today, we text and even speak in an entirely different language to make things shorter and simpler. Several interesting more philosophical topics have arisen in 1984 such as what is history. In the book, Winston's job is to correct how history is written so that his Party is always correct. This makes you question how we ever really know what true history really is because works from the past could be edited and rewritten or portrayed in a different light. Furthermore 1984 addresses the power of language and how theoretically you could adjust the language to control peoples thoughts. I think a real life example of this would be the fact that there was not a word for privacy in the Chinese language until recently because privacy was not a cultural phenomenon.