Monday, May 19, 2008
Newspeak - Relevant today, as ever.
george-orwell.org: 1984 - George Orwell
For discussion purposes. Much of the VI nonsense about house prices is ominously similar to George Orwell's Newspeak language, which cuts out words that do not match the aims of Big Brother. The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple dichotomies which reinforce the total dominance of the State. The underlying theory of Newspeak is that if something can't be said, then it can't be thought. Generically, Newspeak has come to mean any attempt to restrict disapproved language by a government or other powerful entity. - I'll start off. The use of statistics like CPI deflecting attention from monetary expansion. Negative price growth, eliminating the phrase: price falls. The national socialist dichotomy of blaming immigrants for high prices.
11 Comments
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1. planning4acrash said...
To read the book online in full: http://www.george-orwell.org/1984
For some more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
2. gone-to-colombia said...
There are many similarities between the world we inhabit and Orwell's 1984.
For examples - Doublespeak, where words and phrases have opposite meaning or hide the original true meaning of that which the word describes. Cruise missile is good example.
Then, the dividing of the world into three groupings, Eurasia, Oceania and Eastasia. Britain being a part of Oceania called Airstrip One. This did seem to mirror the world of the super powers and the third world.
Yet, Orwell's dystopic vision seems to tell us more about post war Britain than anything else, the seedy run down world of Winston Smith. There is some reason to believe that Orwell was saying more about the Atlee government rather than warning about the future.
Orwell died a deeply troubled and unhappy man, his wife had died shortly before, he wrote 1984 in the last years of his life, much of it in a lonely croft on Jura.
3. Winston Smith's Underpants said...
"Politics and the English Language".
"When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity. "
The scary possibility is that T. Blair must have read that paragraph from E. Blair and rather than see it is a warning took it to be a "how-to" guide...
And G-to-C, that old slander eh. No, Orwell intended no criticism of the Labour party or Atlee, we know because he said so! My personal view is that Orwell was not as parochial in his concerns as all that and that in reading 1984 allowance must be made for (a) satire and (b) the influence of Yevgeny Zamyatin. The "seedy run down world" theme (e.g., ersatz food, decay, blandness) appears as early as "Coming up for air" (1939) so I don't think it means anything more specific in 1949.
4. mark wadsworth said...
I have often blogged on the similarity between Nulabour and 1984.
But the made-up and inappropriate phrase that really p1sses me off is 'housing crisis'.
This is not a housing crisis. It's the same number of people living in the same number of homes. Why not call it an 'interest rate shock'?
5. Uro_who said...
I agree that there are amazing similarities with today. Everywhere one goes plasma screens beam out BBC News 24 proclaiming this years tractor production figures. We certainly have a ministry of truth. We have a trumped up war with an enemy no-one has actually seen and we can now be prosecuted for having visited web sites which may aid terrorism or having a book on explosives. If that isn't thought crime I don't know what is. ID cards and biometrics anyone?
6. letthemfall said...
P4C: Interesting post. Quite a chilling read actually. The abuse of language and the proliferation of jargon are amongst my pet hates. Plenty of that in Govt and VI speak. Note the proliferation of filler expressions like "in terms of" too. I could go on for ages (the American use of "alternative" and "alternate" as synonyms for instance) but it would get boring.
7. planning4acrash said...
No, let them fall. Carry on, please explain, because I'm only just beginning to learn about this stuff, and never heard about filler expressions, etc. Thank you.
8. cornishman said...
It was so long ago that I read them, that 1984 and Brave New World merge in my mind. Was 1984 the book with the viewscreen in every house that enabled Big Brother to see what was going on?
It seems uncanny to me that someone could foresee that happening over 60 years ago. Whilst we are not quite there yet, it's easy to see now that the internet connection linked to the plasma TV linked to the webcam will be used to 'monitor' what happens in each house. It will doubtless be justified by anti-terrorism laws and the argument will be put about that 'if you haven't got anything to hide then you have nothing to fear'.
Just as blog comments will be removed if they do not 'conform'...
9. planning4acrash said...
The new Apple Macs have inbuilt cameras and microphones that the user cannot turn off. The web is littered with people blogging about how to turn the damn things off because of them working in an environment where surviellance is not allowed. It is easy enough to cover the camera with tape, but the microphone is hidden under the speaker, within the casing, and it appears almost impossible to turn it off and guarantee that nobody is listening in. Unlike the camera, the microphone doesn't have an LED to show that it is being used be a program. The webcam, alledgedly cannot work without the green LED on, but there is a possibility that a very weak usage of it, amplified on reciept, could possibly short cut the system. Sattelite tracking mobile phones. Apparently there is a chip in the new USA passport that holds information about people that they are not aware of, and that it has a tracking function. Is this in our new ones? Will it be in the ID cards and the biometric passports? Scary stuff indeed.
10. cornishman said...
re Apple Macs - I saw an article at the weekend detailing someone who had a Mac stolen and used their internet remote access to use the inbuilt camera to see who was using the stolen computer, got them arrested and got their machine back.
I do wonder when 'we, the people' will rise up and say enough is enough regarding these incremental increases in surveillance. Maybe we won't. Maybe society will fracture with whole groups of us choosing to live their lives outside the system to avoid being spied upon..
11. planning4acrash said...
Anybody know how to turn off the freakin microphone without ripping it out and trashing the machine? An ominous sign, my msn messenger starts flooding me with invites to dirty webcam viewing, curiously, at a similar time to when I've been covering the camera. Could be a co-incidence, but I find it a bit freaky.