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unhappycamper

(60,364 posts)
Fri Jun 27, 2014, 06:33 AM Jun 2014

What Orwell might have said about today’s Big Brothers

http://theconversation.com/what-orwell-might-have-said-about-todays-big-brothers-28462



Who’s watching who?

What Orwell might have said about today’s Big Brothers
25 June 2014, 11.57am BST

So it’s Day 21 in Channel 5’s Big Brother household. It would also have been George Orwell’s 111th birthday. And this month marks 65 years since his landmark novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published. With all that in mind, I’m taking a moment to think about what Orwell means to us in 2014.

“Big Brother is watching you” wherever you are in Orwell’s dystopian world. The novel’s anti-hero, Winston Smith, has to huddle in the alcove of his living room to avoid the gaze of the “telescreen” which monitors him and every other citizen day and night. Constant surveillance is the cornerstone of Big Brother’s power. Each resident lives like an inmate of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, caught up, as Michel Foucault would say, in “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power”.

Since the Big Brother reality TV game show first took the Netherlands by storm in 1999, it seems we’ve become increasingly used to watching inmates ourselves. Back in 2000, when Big Brother first aired in the UK, it attracted some 10 million viewers. Research suggests that watching reality television fulfils some of our basic desires for vicarious experience and self-importance. It offers us a gratifying illusion – one that Orwell would probably warn against buying into if his novels are anything to go by.



~snip~

Whether it’s capitalism, imperialism or totalitarianism, Orwell’s novels impress upon us that those who refuse to become slaves to the dominant ideology face alienation, defeat, incarceration, even destruction. John Flory of Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days (1934), is a timber merchant in Burma sickened by imperial values. But his attempt to finally bring himself to stand up against his compatriots’ racism in support of his Indian friend only leads to his suicide.
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