1984, By George Orwell: Has Society Changed?
Has Society Changed?
Throughout the history of politics there have been many instances where individuals have found ways to suppress opposition and take extreme measures to secure their power. Many authors have written about totalitarians and what they could entail. One of the most famous authors, George Orwell, dictates the story of how Ingsoc led to the rise of the Party and recounts the daily lives, struggles, and adventures of its citizens. In the book, 1984, Orwell cautions society about the future of government control and the dangers of totalitarianism through pointing out the paths which they take, but society has done little to heed this warning and is bound towards a similar fate. Safety in the world can be achieved in many ways …show more content…
As NBS News puts it, "Carnivore [the software used to monitor citizens] uses a list of FBI-supplied keywords to sift through email (maybe everybody's email) to find suspicious references to call FBI attention to possibly nefarious conversations going on across the Internet". Using these systems, that the government places it creates a relatively safer environment, but also causes privacy and ethical issues. The measures that governments take to ensure the safety of their citizens comes at a cost to the citizen’s own rights and freedoms. Citizens in today’s society have a more powerful voice and use it to limit and/or prevent the loss of privacy. Other nation’s citizens are not as lucky. They are subjected to intense monitoring every day. An extreme version of this system of surveillance was found in the form of the KGB or the Soviet Union’s Security Agency from 1954 to 1991. Their task was to monitor the citizens for any form of crime against the Soviet Union and report the wrongdoers. This scarily resembles the security system the Orwell wrote about 6 years before. He realized the potential of a system like the KGB to arise. Other forms of surveillance have arisen through cameras on law-enforcing personnel and vehicles, wiretaps on phones and communication lines, and many others. These surveillance systems threaten Orwell’s belief of freedom and; therefore, gave him grounds to begin his
Throughout the history of politics there have been many instances where individuals have found ways to suppress opposition and take extreme measures to secure their power. Many authors have written about totalitarians and what they could entail. One of the most famous authors, George Orwell, dictates the story of how Ingsoc led to the rise of the Party and recounts the daily lives, struggles, and adventures of its citizens. In the book, 1984, Orwell cautions society about the future of government control and the dangers of totalitarianism through pointing out the paths which they take, but society has done little to heed this warning and is bound towards a similar fate. Safety in the world can be achieved in many ways …show more content…
As NBS News puts it, "Carnivore [the software used to monitor citizens] uses a list of FBI-supplied keywords to sift through email (maybe everybody's email) to find suspicious references to call FBI attention to possibly nefarious conversations going on across the Internet". Using these systems, that the government places it creates a relatively safer environment, but also causes privacy and ethical issues. The measures that governments take to ensure the safety of their citizens comes at a cost to the citizen’s own rights and freedoms. Citizens in today’s society have a more powerful voice and use it to limit and/or prevent the loss of privacy. Other nation’s citizens are not as lucky. They are subjected to intense monitoring every day. An extreme version of this system of surveillance was found in the form of the KGB or the Soviet Union’s Security Agency from 1954 to 1991. Their task was to monitor the citizens for any form of crime against the Soviet Union and report the wrongdoers. This scarily resembles the security system the Orwell wrote about 6 years before. He realized the potential of a system like the KGB to arise. Other forms of surveillance have arisen through cameras on law-enforcing personnel and vehicles, wiretaps on phones and communication lines, and many others. These surveillance systems threaten Orwell’s belief of freedom and; therefore, gave him grounds to begin his