1984 By George Orwell Essay

Facebook, twitter and instagram posts are not as private as they seem. Over the decades and as technology advanced, surveillance has become easier and easier. In 1949 when George Orwell wrote the book 1984, he had a vision of the future with more advanced technology. He envisioned a totalitarian country where the government would be able to see and control all that goes on within the country and the its citizens which ranges from social media to bank transactions, emails to phone calls and even daily whereabouts and activities. Today, we find ourselves in a world where everything is collected, saved, searched and analyzed although we don’t live in a dystopian society. The entire population, not just specific individuals, now lives

We read about how the citizens are monitored on a daily basis not only by the party or big brother but also by their neighbors and friends and even random people who see you wherever you are. In the book, even the kids are trained to spy on people and report suspicious activity to the thought police with the aim of helping the country be a much safer place with exercised freedom. This is shown when Parsons gets a chance to talk to Winston in the cafeteria about how his daughter followed a man who she suspected to be an enemy agent because he was dressed like a foreigner. He says ‘”She got two other girls to go with her, they slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following the strange man. They kept on his trail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.’”(Orwell 57). This quote shows us how much the children of Oceania have been brainwashed and trained to keep an eye on everyone they see and to turn in whomever they have suspicions about. Everyone in Oceania is also the same way, looking out and spying on their neighbors and friends in an attempt to keep the country free from the enemy. The same way one person is spying on the someone else, so is another person spying on them. This makes it easier to see that individuals’ activities are constantly being monitored by someone