What Is The Role Of Technology In George Orwell's 1984?

“In the end [sic] the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it” (Orwell, 2003, p.80). Throughout his novel, George Orwell often predicts the slow deterioration of both intellectual and social control as the omniscient “Party” undermines the public it serves by changing history and becoming the monarch source of all information. Although Orwell’s prognosis of society dates back 67 years, today the increased use of online technology has brought many of the scary predictions of 1984’s dystopian society to light. There is a surplus of information (especially in the intellectual American niche)

The supply and demand of information has only been modified to fit its new online format, and Google has become a main controller of the ebb and flow of this business model. “In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency” (Carr 10). When books were the sole authority for information, they implied that the authors owned the ideas discussed, a single voice of knowledge and the owner of this commodity (Batson, 2009, p.2), but as the internet progresses there is a shift of ownership taking place. Instead of the author being the main provider for information, the distributors or search engines have become increasingly more in control of the“product”. Often times, people bypass the association to authors entirely; they attribute their knowledge to the phrase, “Oh, I just Googled it.” For example, when I was younger and had to find pictures online for a school project, I always had to be reminded that citing “Google Images” as a source instead the actual creator was incorrect. In this way, the internet strips away the value of intellectual

By collecting terabytes of behavioral data collected from its users, Google is able to refine its algorithms to “increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.” It is obvious that Google is motivated by scientific exploration, for some of the most influential inventions of modern technology were invented by Google--self-driving cars, Google Earth, Google Glass etc; however, when trying to systemize how people discover knowledge, eliminating error, it implies eliminating the very idiosyncrasies that allow each man to form a different opinion from his neighbor. What seems like a noble ambition edges towards reconditioning the individuality and very core of