How Is 1984 by George Orwell Relevant Today?

NAME: Nitya Mathur

CLASS: SYBMM

ROLL NO.: M14039

‘1984’

How is 1984 relevant today?

1984, written by George Orwell in 1948, brings us into the life of the protagonist, Winston Smith, living in a dystopian world of hierarchal bounds. The peak of this food chain is crowned with Big Brother and The Party as they practice despotism to maintain control and power over the citizens. As Winston begins to turn sick of these chains, he meets Julia, and soon finds himself deliberately disregarding and condemning the oppressive government. 1984 is George Orwell’s terrifying vision of a totalitarian future in which everyone and everything is slave to a tyrannical regime.

However, is it possible that we might unconsciously find ourselves at the brink of this control today?

According to 2014 statistics, we spend an average of 184 minutes per day surfing the internet on desktop and laptop devices each day, and 134 minutes on our smartphones. It is safe to believe that media, in all it’s forms, has become an eminent and omnipresent entity in our lives. This hook that media has gained over our minds has not only damaged our ability to think, but greatly influenced our understanding and perception of news- not too far off from the practices of The Party.

In Orwell’s novel, the main objective of the Party was to manipulate and alter the memories and thoughts of the citizens of Oceania. Consequently, the Thought Police was formed to keep eyes out for slightest betrayals and shifts away from the wishes of Big Brother. Orwell portrays how vulnerable and gullible a human mind can be to brutal force. Some say that media today takes advantage of this vulnerability, and feeds us news and facts with the sole objective of profit making and higher ‘TRPs’. Another distinct form of manipulation used by The Party is the creation of fake history and destruction of the truth. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth with the job of rewriting and falsifying history. Orwell worked for BBC for a time, and claimed that they put out false hate propaganda during World War II, and controlled history by censoring news about the genocidal Allied policy of levelling German cities by saturation bombing. Orwell also gained inspiration from his experiences in the Spanish civil war, where he found that "no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain for the first time I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts.”

Telescreens, posters of BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the Thought Police surround and corner citizens every minute, reminding them that it is simply impossible to escape the party.

We wake up every morning, read the newspaper, check FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media websites on our cell phones and laptops, listen to music that has either been downloaded from the internet or on the radio, watch movies every other day, conduct a chunk of research via the internet, watch television, shows, series, YouTube, etc. etc.

Over the last decade, the presence of media has grown to the scales of Big Brother, and it’s consumption has become unavoidable. Today, in order to successfully thrive in society, acceptance and understanding of media is imperative.

Babies to baby boomers are avid consumers and between the TV, computer, Internet, gaming system and cell phone, there are so many avenues for being plugged in. Kids in particular are increasing their screen time, game time and Internet time and are growing up in an age where constant media access is expected, and desired. Statistics has it that by the time a child turns 18, he must have seen around 2,00,000 acts of violence on television. The consequent influence that media has been having over young minds is pasted all over news reports, statistics and conversation, and it’s not all optimistic. As experts say, children naturally copy. For instance, there is a study showing