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Date Posted: 12:19:16 05/02/07 Wed
Author: Marcelo Antonio Fiuza Coelho (Big Brother still watching you)
Subject: task 2

Big Brother still watching you


Narrated with futurist images, 1984, it raises very relative questions to the current situations. It is possible to be said that the transformation of the reality, central subject of the novel, is the portrait of the present. In the book, the character principal Winston Smith, official of the Ministry of the Truth, alters data and reports, in accordance with the interests of the party, a way of handling very much found in the current days, for the media (magazines, newspapers, programs of TV, you write soap operas, news sections, etc.).

The characteristics of the novel, very well counted by Orwell, give us that there is vision of future in which we live, like the teletelas (The Big Brother), the Newspeak, the Division of Classes and the Book of Goldstein. In case of the teletelas, we are looked separately, it seems that Orwell was having a vision of which in the future the persons would be slaves of the television, if they were easily manipulated, exactly as it happens in the book
In this vision, he implied already of what the television would be an excellent vehicle of communication in mass and easy to get to the intimate life of the persons. Who, at that time, might predict a television in each comfortable one of the houses? To wake him with someone calling to do gymnastics? Or to receive news "online"? Without telling that nowadays we assist TV laid in the bed, or have inside the car, or taking breakfast, or having dinner, or in the university, at any place where there is TV. And where there is no TV?
To read “ 1984 “ is an invitation to think. To look to his turn and to reason on the world, to be learnt not to let deceive not even to manipulate through the communication, to question on the division of classes and to protect the dictatorial governments. This in scenery who uses the scientific fiction like mechanism to count a terrible fable.
Besides more, communication is a very outstanding characteristic of the work is it the newspeak which I see with a relation still stronger with the days of today, digamous that it was almost a prophecy, since if the objective of the introduction of the new language, in 1984, was of reducing the vocabulary to reduce the capacity of thought, what to say of the language used in internet to communicate? And of the slangs, when several groups were used for, varying according to the origin, musical (rap, funk, pagoda, etc.), sense of humor (surf, skate, etc.), finally, soon we will have so many dialects that our society will be going to turn into a huge mass, if already it was not transformed.

As for the division of classes, it is still equal as it was at that time, in 1948; at least in Brazil it is the same. So, it is today equally as Orwell described in the book. So, any society that adopts a totalitarian system, being it Nazi, communist, imperialist, it will have such consequences, in other words, this society will become a “ great funnel ” where few ones will have opportunity for developing, and these few opportunities, they will be alone for that that are highly prepared, exactly as it happens today.
In case of the Book of Goldstein and of the Big Brother itself (Great Brother), Orwell, wanted to alert us as for the leaders or dictators whom we had, we have and we will have. Dictators and crazy, like the character, what believe in his doctrines themselves with such conviction that they manage to convince armies of men and women, that they them take to the fields of battle or cities of battle, struggle and lose his lives for questions that they do not belong. In the time, in 1948, the Big Brother was compared to Josef Stalin and Goldstein to Trotsky. However, at present we can quote someone or much what they do not leave to be desired to any of the quoted leaders of 1984, like Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Hugo Chavez, who recently closed the biggest net of Venezuelan television and nothing more swims less what George W. Bush, who with arguments not convincing at all, was managed to re-elect for more four years.
This makes us think about the questions quoted previously as to the media, handling, etc. All the traumas and how many do you torture will we have to pass to manage to have peace? (As Winston suffered during novel). And the question what it does not want to conceal – does The Big Brother exist? Does Osama Bin Laden exist? Or is it only a "marketing" to restrict us?

This is not a history with a happy end. Well far from that. But it is therefore that it keeps on being current. At last, the handling of the information, the democracy and the access to the education — through which we learn to use a language that allows to us to understand the world — they keep on being so current subjects today how in ends of the decade of 40 of the century XX.


Work cited:
Orwell, George, 1984. New York: The New American Library Inc., 1983
Greenblast, StephenJ. “Orwell as Satirist”. George Orwell, A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Raymond Williams. Englewood Clifs

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