Comparing George Orwell's Politics And The English Language

Writing and print have always been changing, and with these innovations, the people of the world were compelled to adapt. From written word in the first place, to bound books, to printing presses, to typewriters, and now computers and the internet. With every change, people expect the worst of what is new, and they presumably have their reasons, yet each medium, or innovation in writing, possesses it’s positive and negative aspects. In adapting George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” for a digital medium, I had to initiate adjustments to enable what Maryanne Wolf calls “deep reading” (Wolf). Deep reading is made possible in the digital format through careful adaptations, though the ways in which we focus on long texts, the speed

“The more they use the web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing,” (Carr), is what one author wrote, and I agree with this statement. Technology and especially social media have conditioned us to be accustomed to short texts, for example, twitter, which has a 120-character max. Once one has adapted to this, indeed they would find difficulty in reading novels or academic papers. Also, “users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are new forms of reading emerging as users power browse,” (Baron) meaning that rather than thoroughly reading texts, readers are only skimming them, looking for the main points. By doing this, they may miss crucial words or ideas. In Orwell’s essay, his ideas are adequately organized and contained in paragraphs, but nevertheless, are quite lengthy. Due to this, it is consistently hard to follow a thought from outset to conclusion and determine the main idea when an abundance is discussed amidst. To remedy this problem in my own digital adaptation, I decided to use brief and precise blocks of text. I separated quotes and ideas into different sections so that the reader would only have one thought at a time to focus on, and if referring

The digital world is befitting for two of three of Aristotle’s lives which Wolf and Barzillai speak of, the life of activity and the life of enjoyment. Even though not knowing what exactly Aristotle may have meant, you can infer the speed which these lives involve, and thus disallowing the slower processes of deep reading. Also, many readers today hold “perceptions that we lack the leisure time necessary for doing longer reading” (Baron), and thus do not attempt to dive into longer texts. This is another issue connected with focus, since it constitutes length. Because of this, I was able to facilitate deep reading in my adaptation once again, by having short and precise paragraphs. To incorporate the speed which digital readers are acclimatized to, I also kept my blog page organized and streamlined so as to have the information and important points effortlessly accessible, and not in essay format. All the information is on a singular page, thus creating a sense of immediacy while efficiency is also realized through a singular page in conjunction with the full posts easily accessible through clear and direct links. Through this, the digital medium appears less daunting and important information can be analyzed while still catering to the digitally adept