2019's Brave New 1984
Over the recent summer, I read 1984 by George Orwell. Reading 1984 and Brave New World showed me a shocking resemblance between fictional Dystopias and today's technologically-driven world.
(No Spoiler Alert)
In 1984, Orwell introduces a technology called a telescreen, a 24/7 personal surveillance camera. The thought of being watched for every second of your live is frightening. However, considering the amount of time all of us spend on social media, these telescreens bear an uncomfortable resemblance to Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and other social media outlets we use everyday. A consequence of interacting with our electronic devices so much? Numerous opportunities to get influenced and misconstrued by inappropriate and twisted reality and news. Additionally, with social media becoming more accessible to younger kids, the risk of leading young minds to erroneous conclusions is even higher. This is where the Brave New World part of the resemblance comes in.
Two things shocked me the most while reading Brave New World: human standardization and hypnopaedia. By human standardization, I'm referring to the World State's decision to essentially program various groups of identical individuals to think and behave the same way, hammering in what they should think. Hypnopaedia is also manipulative, as individuals are hypnotized to recite information. While it might seem like an extreme comparison, human standardization and hypnopaedia is similar to how we can be manipulated by social media. This might seem like an unusual example, but a lot of people can relate to it. Every day, I check out the House of Highlights Instagram page. Every sports fan should know this page; it has all the highlights from every sport--mostly basketball. These highlights are the best highlights of the day. For basketball, these highlights include the most spectacular dunks and shots. Most of the time, however, I'm in awe of these spectacular plays without knowing the full story. While I think a certain player was amazing because of this one play, the full picture and game showed that this player in fact played horribly that night, but because of the way the information was displayed, on the most popular sports page on Instagram, I wouldn't have ever known that player had a bad game if I hadn't done some research. It's amusing because everybody else is also deceived. Users in the comment section are flattering over the one play and asserting bold opinions about the player without facts and strong evidence. Without much thought, these basketball "fans" recite certain comments because they perceive it as the right thing to do. Hypnopaedia in disguise? More generally, whether it's sports, politics, or religion, the controversial topics that scatter across social media can seriously hinder the ability for people, especially young people, to make right choices. Once an opinion influences a young kid, it's going to be progressively difficult in the future to change his or her mind. Social media can "program" these innocent kids to think and behave a specific way. Human standardization in disguise?
I'll admit that I'm reaching a little. Obviously, we're not practicing hypnopaedia or being identically processed and manipulated by some Bokanovsky process. Clearly, there isn't a 24 hour telescreen that watches everything we do. However, my main point is this: while some of us, including me, might have been surprised and disgusted at such Dystopian concepts, the reality is that the world we're living in is not so far off. The modern world is just masked to be less glaring and manipulative. In fact, we may be living in 2019's Brave New 1984.
(No Spoiler Alert)
In 1984, Orwell introduces a technology called a telescreen, a 24/7 personal surveillance camera. The thought of being watched for every second of your live is frightening. However, considering the amount of time all of us spend on social media, these telescreens bear an uncomfortable resemblance to Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and other social media outlets we use everyday. A consequence of interacting with our electronic devices so much? Numerous opportunities to get influenced and misconstrued by inappropriate and twisted reality and news. Additionally, with social media becoming more accessible to younger kids, the risk of leading young minds to erroneous conclusions is even higher. This is where the Brave New World part of the resemblance comes in.
Two things shocked me the most while reading Brave New World: human standardization and hypnopaedia. By human standardization, I'm referring to the World State's decision to essentially program various groups of identical individuals to think and behave the same way, hammering in what they should think. Hypnopaedia is also manipulative, as individuals are hypnotized to recite information. While it might seem like an extreme comparison, human standardization and hypnopaedia is similar to how we can be manipulated by social media. This might seem like an unusual example, but a lot of people can relate to it. Every day, I check out the House of Highlights Instagram page. Every sports fan should know this page; it has all the highlights from every sport--mostly basketball. These highlights are the best highlights of the day. For basketball, these highlights include the most spectacular dunks and shots. Most of the time, however, I'm in awe of these spectacular plays without knowing the full story. While I think a certain player was amazing because of this one play, the full picture and game showed that this player in fact played horribly that night, but because of the way the information was displayed, on the most popular sports page on Instagram, I wouldn't have ever known that player had a bad game if I hadn't done some research. It's amusing because everybody else is also deceived. Users in the comment section are flattering over the one play and asserting bold opinions about the player without facts and strong evidence. Without much thought, these basketball "fans" recite certain comments because they perceive it as the right thing to do. Hypnopaedia in disguise? More generally, whether it's sports, politics, or religion, the controversial topics that scatter across social media can seriously hinder the ability for people, especially young people, to make right choices. Once an opinion influences a young kid, it's going to be progressively difficult in the future to change his or her mind. Social media can "program" these innocent kids to think and behave a specific way. Human standardization in disguise?
I'll admit that I'm reaching a little. Obviously, we're not practicing hypnopaedia or being identically processed and manipulated by some Bokanovsky process. Clearly, there isn't a 24 hour telescreen that watches everything we do. However, my main point is this: while some of us, including me, might have been surprised and disgusted at such Dystopian concepts, the reality is that the world we're living in is not so far off. The modern world is just masked to be less glaring and manipulative. In fact, we may be living in 2019's Brave New 1984.
Honestly, I don't think you're reaching at all. It is true that while we watch and use social media, social media is watching and using us as well. We become, or try to become, the people that society wants us to become - rather, what we think society wants us to become, as seen through popular social media accounts. The hypnopaedia is not quite hypnopaedia as we are not asleep, but it rather dominates our active hours. For many of us, this is from the very moment we get up to the moment we finally acknowledge we are tired and reluctantly put down our phones to sleep.
ReplyDeleteInteresting comparison. I think you make a good point about social media, although at least many of us have the chance to opt out, unlike in Brave New World. Their hypnopaedia is controlled by the government, ours by private corporations mostly. Companies know what they're doing and are marketing things to us in sneaky (and not so sneaky) ways all the time, using things like the addictiveness of social media to their advantage. And powerful entities, like the government (or verified twitter accounts), can use their power to spread propaganda and false info. Fortunately, we're not on soma so we can be a bit more aware of it and try to act against manipulation.
ReplyDeleteI like Bridget's distinction between companies and governments and their different motivations. Companies will always be trying to sell something or make more money. Like, we know that's what they're doing, no matter what. A hypothetical government is a bit harder to predict because it's supposed to work for the good of the people it's governing. It's just that what one person thinks is good is not what someone else thinks is good. So if the government were using stuff like hypnopaedia, it could be a genuine attempt to help, or it could be totally corrupt and nefarious.
ReplyDeleteBut as you pointed out in your post, Matthew, humans are being manipulated all the time, even if it's not by the government or by companies.
This is an interesting comparison between our world and the World State. While we constantly monitor social media, others monitor us through our posts and likes. Like with the comment section on the basketball post, we recite things we think are right for the situation. Like when a friend posts a cute pic, we say "omg gorgeous" or "ily bestie", we say things that we have been conditioned to say. This post also reminds me of the FBI guy meme, a meme which jokes about the fact that we could be monitored through our phone and laptop cameras by the government.
ReplyDeleteI totally see where you're coming from. A novel that I'm reading, "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" by Yuval Noah Harari, dedicates quite a few chapters to discusses how modern day technology - social media especially - are impacting our world and our people living in it. Like you mentioned, Harari too touches on this idea of deceit and misinformation guided by technology driven media and the way that viewers digest it. To be completely honest, it can be scary to think about where our world is going! I think that educating people on these concerns and being aware of change are the most promising ways to ensure that we don't become a living model of "1984" or "Brave New World." Very interesting points!
ReplyDeleteThe internet both serves as a blessing and a curse. Along with being a treasure trove of information, it is also a treasure trove of misinformation. I liked your example where you describe how the basketball player seemed to have a good game to people who merely read the title, but in reality the player had a bad game. It reminds of me of people calling internet forums "Echo chambers", as people just repeatedly parrot whatever they read/see without any regard to accuracy. This can be interpreted in a dystopian fashion, as people start to believe in things that aren't actually true.
ReplyDeleteThis is really interesting. There were lots of things in Brave New World that reminded me of our own world, but this is sometihng that I had never thought about. I agree that it's extremely easy to be influenced by social media - sometimes it's in good ways, but a lot of times it's in harmful was. I remember when I first started caring about politics a lot of what I consumed was social media posts, and I did a LOT of reciting points that I had read in random tumblr posts on the instagram explore page. As I've gotten older and more and more started having my own opinions, I've realized that I do genuinely believe a lot of these things so I don't necessarily feel like I've been brainwashed, but I recognize how easy it is to just take at face value the information you've been fed.
ReplyDeleteWhile we may not have telescreens, all our laptops and phones serve the exact same purposes today. I used to believe that I had some semblance of privacy on the internet by using VPNs, but after reading Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous I was shocked by how the government can listen and view all our emails, calls, texts and pictures without warrants. So yes I guess we really are living in 2019's Brave New 1984.
ReplyDeleteThe sheer amount of information and data companies and the government are able to gather about us based on our screen time is insane. I have heard a story, i don't remember where, about how target's shopping algorithms figured out a teenage girl was pregnant and was sending her coupons for baby related things before her dad found out. I'm not sure if its true or not but it speaks to this idea of companies having insane amounts of knowledge about us but then also trying to use that information to control us and influence what we buy.
ReplyDeleteI think your comments about how information is spread through social media, and how it influences people and a larger society, is an interesting one. The relationship between humans, technology, and information, then, seems important to the functioning of any society. The idea of how reality can be easily distorted and changed for a mass audience, to serve the benefits of a few, strikes me as a strongly dystopian idea. I also think that you connections you make between these fictional dystopias and our world and significant. Perhaps some societal elements we read about in fictional dystopias are exaggerated from our world, yet we can find them around us all the same.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, perhaps the pivotal moment in the "information rights era" was the Patriot Act after 9/11. This gave the US Government unprecedented access to our information and data. Soon, private entities followed. Although it is often forgot, I wonder if this will prove to be a watershed moment in the privacy rights of individual data.
ReplyDelete