Essays On The Book 1984

Data collection in 1984 was deliberate; today's is inadvertent.

Data collection in 1984 was deliberate; today's is inadvertent.In the information society, we generate data naturally.

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Your phone company knows who you talk to, your credit card company knows where you shop and Net Flix knows what you watch.

Your ISP can read your email, your cell phone can track your movements and your supermarket can monitor your purchasing patterns.

Of course these companies will take advantage of a national ID; they'd be stupid not to. Today, there's no reason to have anyone watch anyone else; computers can do the work of people. And finally, the police state of 1984 was deliberately constructed, while today's is naturally emergent.

And the correlations, data mining and precise categorizing they can do is why the U. There's no reason to postulate a malicious police force and a government trying to subvert our freedoms.

Orwell explains many issues prominent throughout the book in which his main characters attempt to overcome.

He shows how surveillance can easily corrupt those in control and how those in control become corrupt by the amount of power. George Orwell extrapolated his totalitarian state from the 1940s.Today's information society looks nothing like Orwell's world, and watching and intimidating a population today isn't anything like what Winston Smith experienced.The leaders of a country or society are supposed to be there to help its people, however, in both Oceana and North Korea it seems to do just the opposite.In Oceana, the Inner Party controls the food and amount of food its citizens get.In Orwell's world, people were naturally anonymous; today, we leave digital footprints everywhere.1984's police state was centralized; today's is decentralized.You can also see hints of what it might look like in our completely dysfunctional “no-fly” list and useless projects to secretly categorize people according to potential terrorist risk. There's no reason to assume today's will be any more effective.The fear isn't an Orwellian government deliberately creating the ultimate totalitarian state, although with the U.1984's Big Brother was run by the state; today's Big Brother is market driven.Data brokers like Choice Point and credit bureaus like Experian aren't trying to build a police state; they're just trying to turn a profit. East Germany employed one informant for every 66 citizens. If some data is too expensive to save today, it'll be affordable in a few years.