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1984

Have you read the (novel) '1984'?

  • Yes

    Votes: 45 90.0%

  • No, but I intend to do so

    Votes: 3 6.0%

  • No and I don't think I will

    Votes: 2 4.0%
  • Total voters
    50
Big Brother has been watching for a long, long time. The masses are just now figuring it out. ;)
 
Yeah, I can see why that would spur interest...Forced to read it in 10th grade. In fact, the *only* high school book that was worth reading. Hopefully they aren't reading it and going "I want to join the NSA now!!"
 
I never read it, but I head quite a bit of it.

It seems that since Carter didn't get a second term, it had to wait for Carter Jr. to be elected.
 
Information from the Ministry of Marketing.
 
MoSurveyor said:
Big Brother has been watching for a long, long time. The masses are just now figuring it out. ;)
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Not quite. For example, it would take a god to monitor all these things 50 or 100 years ago. But now every family has a TV to brainwash the public, mobile phones (which can act both as tracking and eavesdropping device), numerous surveillance cameras, a computer (monitoring interests, opinions, private correspondence, etc), machines TO RECORD all this information and the searching engines to sort it out.

Btw, your nickname looks soooo suspicious. :lol:
 
Canell said:
Not quite. For example, it would take a god to monitor all these things 50 or 100 years ago. But now every family has a TV to brainwash the public, mobile phones (which can act both as tracking and eavesdropping device), numerous surveillance cameras, a computer (monitoring interests, opinions, private correspondence, etc), machines TO RECORD all this information and the searching engines to sort it out.

Btw, your nickname looks soooo suspicious. :lol:
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TV has been around for 60 years now and back then it was only three channels plus maybe an education channel. Before that the country was hooked on radio, which wasn't just music. In the 50's the first faltering steps toward mass advertisement were taken, by the 70's Madison Ave was as popular a moniker as Wall St.

Local governments have always been able to listen in on phone calls. Tracking who was talking to whom cross country or outside the country was easy with only one long distance company and darn few calls because of the cost.

Surveillance cams have been around for decades. They first started popping up in the 80's. Before that there were a lot of guards watching through one-way mirrors.

Reel to reel tapes, the good ones, not those cheap things, could hold hours of conversation per reel.


The main thing that changed was the digitizing of communications of all kinds and, thereby, being able to use computers to help with assimilation and pattern detection instead of having a whole room full of specialists just to do a few jobs. It's also made a new market in business as well with companies doing their own pattern detection on what few links they can make for you, so it's not just Uncle Sam we should be worried about. Corporate America is watching what you do, too, and starting to use focused advertisement, planned just for your consumption. :-/



BTW - I'm a retired Missouri land surveyor. The first line in my sig contains a clue to that. ;)
 
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Yep, one of my favorites. Loved animal farm, too. Made me into a libertarian until I realized that laissez faire was a pipe dream. Now I've ditched the labels, and that has made all of the difference.
 
MoSurveyor said:
TV has been around for 60 years now and back then it was only three channels plus maybe an education channel...
Local governments have always been able to listen in on phone calls.
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Yes but a few people had them at first. No phone, no listen. I doubt if they could scan regular mail.
Bur now virtually everyone has a phone and a TV, which makes monitoring a piece of cake.
Bill Gates once said that "640K ought to be enough for anybody". Now the regular redneck HDD is already 1 TB which gives almost limitless potential to record and process info - metadata, video streams, logs, etc. etc.

MoSurveyor said:
BTW - I'm a retired Missouri land surveyor. The first line in my sig contains a clue to that. ;)
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:rolleyes:
 
So Orwell was prophetic. Worth the read if only to learn how influential the novel has been. The Doublespeak Awards, the thought police, freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4, being a rebel only from the waist down, how if there's hope, it lies with the proles, and why the Party does what it does: Because it can.

One of my favorite parts is Syme's discussion of the beauty of the destruction of language (Syme speaking to the protagonist, Winston):

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. it isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? …Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.

Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague uselesss words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still…In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words….Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
 
nota bene said:
So Orwell was prophetic. Worth the read if only to learn how influential the novel has been. The Doublespeak Awards, the thought police, freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4, being a rebel only from the waist down, how if there's hope, it lies with the proles, and why the Party does what it does: Because it can.

One of my favorite parts is Syme's discussion of the beauty of the destruction of language (Syme speaking to the protagonist, Winston):

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. it isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? …Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.

Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague uselesss words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still…In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words….Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
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That's an amazing quote.

Not sure if he was that prophetic, though. After all, Nazism and Stalinism were well known already when he wrote it in 1948.
 
I love that book. My favorite concept in the book is "doublethink" because I see it every single day in a society where one's views about Jesus somehow, through the magic of doublethink, directly affects their views on guns and global warming.
 
The other book people need to read which is astonishing in its foresight is "The Iron Heel" by Jack London
 
German guy said:
That's an amazing quote.

Not sure if he was that prophetic, though. After all, Nazism and Stalinism were well known already when he wrote it in 1948.
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I don't think he could've dreamed that we would willingly and cheerfully away give our freedoms. I mean, nobody's making us embed cell phones in our palms.

You're right; the rise of Nazism and Stalinism certainly informed his writings as did the rise of Nazism and Stalinism. More so maybe, because it was at first-hand,his experience in the Spanish Civil War (and copping in Burma and slumming in London and Paris).
 
Interesting, thought provoking thread.

Back when the NSA could actually listen in on ANY communication they wished WITHOUT a FICA court warrant I wonder what the book sales were doing?

At 10 bucks a copy I suspect some on the Radical Right will be all decked out in multiple '1984isms'. Too bad when big brother was actually looking in this didn't happen- is late better than never in this case?

Does put me to thinking back when a right wing guy authorized far more intrusion the Right was nervous but figured the snoopers were on their side, now the 'other team' is in the power seat and the program no longer looks into the communications but the PATTERN they create and it's BUY THE BOOK! :confused:

Still the REAL book to get has moved up 54,949% on the movers and shakers list... at 50 bucks a copy it ain't cheap talking point fodder, the book is 'Here Far Away'

When 1984 goes for 50 bucks a copy instead of 10 and the waiting list is thousands long I'll be impressed. Best I can find is the book rose from 7000ths on the book seller list to 194- impressive math but just how many books are in fact being sold? THAT would be a right handy number to know. :peace

Read the book in High School, read and saw Fahrenheit 451 (which FYI was written over concerns of McCarthy so the authors seemed to worry about the Radical Right than Liberals) Does seem at times 'logic' gets twisted back on itself.
 
Yep. Three times, I think.

I thought it was really funny when the reality show Big Brother came out and many people had no idea what the reference was. Well, not funny....sad.
 
I also remember in high school we read both Brave New World (I've read it a couple times since then) and 1984. Our lit teacher said, "I bet that the U.S. evolves into Brave New World and Europe into 1984." I think we're a bit of both, really.
 
Josie said:
Yep. Three times, I think.

I thought it was really funny when the reality show Big Brother came out and many people had no idea what the reference was. Well, not funny....sad.
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Please tell me you're kidding, Josie. Seriously?
 
Abandon hope. Sigh, not that anybody will recognize Dante either.
 
nota bene said:
Please tell me you're kidding, Josie. Seriously?
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Jeepers, have you ever seen Jay Walking? Leno asks for the identity of the person in the picture (usually someone very obvious, like Abraham Lincoln) and the common answer is "I dunno. Some old dude?" :roll:

As for the books 1984 and Animal Farm, I have read them both years ago, but when I bought my ipad, I bought the digital version of both.
 
Canell said:
Yes but a few people had them at first. No phone, no listen. I doubt if they could scan regular mail.
Bur now virtually everyone has a phone and a TV, which makes monitoring a piece of cake.
Bill Gates once said that "640K ought to be enough for anybody". Now the regular redneck HDD is already 1 TB which gives almost limitless potential to record and process info - metadata, video streams, logs, etc. etc.
Click to expand...
By the mid-70's pretty much everyone had a TV and a phone - even private lines in most cases. They didn't scan snail mail anymore then than they do now.

I remember adding a 1 Mb RAM stick to my computer, then using RAMDisk because DOS couldn't use the extra memory correctly.


It's the data synthases from all the electronic information that concerns me, not the information itself.
 
My high-school cut 1984 from the curriculum and instead we read the bible.

I read the book and thought it was okay, I don't really get the hype and although it slightly accurately represents what the US is like today. I think it mirrors more what London is like. Honestly, I think everyone knew already that our phones could be tapped at any time, and every email we've ever sent is in some massive database somewhere. That's why I gave up on running for president a long time ago.
 
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